Basecamp Research joins the growing group of AI-forward biotechs that in recent months have brought in notable sums from investors, including Isomorphic Labs and Enveda.
Basecamp Research has closed a $140 million series C fundraising to advance its pipeline of therapies designed using machine learning models.
The London- and Boston-based company is backed by NVIDIA and Anthropic, which participated in the oversubscribed round that was led by the venture capital firm S32, according to a news release on Wednesday. Senior leaders from across biopharma—including Roche Vice Chairman André Hoffmann—also contributed to the round.
Basecamp’s model is called EDEN, which is trained on the Trillion Gene Atlas. Launched by Basecamp in March, Atlas is the largest biological dataset for training AI models, according to the biotech, built in collaboration with some of the sector’s biggest players including NVIDIA and Anthropic. EDEN is designed to use this information to generate potential drug candidates, such as peptides, enzymes and cell and gene therapies.
Wednesday’s series C will help advance Basecamp’s investigational medicines produced through EDEN, with an initial focus on in vivo cell therapies—those that rewire a patient’s cells from inside the body, the company said. With EDEN, Basecamp hopes to make cell therapies more customizable and easier to deliver.
“The biotechnology revolution that began fifty years ago transformed how we make medicines. Personalized, AI-designed therapeutics represent the next transformation of that journey,” Roche’s Hoffmann said in a statement.
Basecamp’s series C comes amid an influx of money from tech and more generalist investors into biotech, drawn by the appeal of using AI in drug development and by an emerging class of AI-centric drugmakers that are “building with computation at the core,” Tyrone Lam, chief business officer at GATC Health, told BioSpace in an email interview in August.
Some of the biggest funding rounds this year have involved AI-centric companies, including Alphabet-backed Isomorphic Labs, which in May closed the second-largest round in biotech history with a $2.1 billion series B. Also adding to this trend is Enveda, which on Wednesday brought in $311 million in series E proceeds for three drug candidates discovered with the help of AI.
