DeepMind's drug company just raised $2.1 billion, with new backers including sovereign wealth funds from the UK, the UAE, and Singapore.
The pitch: AI can design new medicines faster and cheaper than humans can. And big money is now betting that pitch is real.
Isomorphic Labs is the AlphaFold team turned into a company. It spun out of Google's DeepMind in 2021 and is run by Sir Demis Hassabis, the same person who runs DeepMind.
The Series B was led by Thrive Capital, the firm Joshua Kushner founded.
Alphabet and GV are back in, and the new names on the list are Temasek (Singapore's sovereign wealth fund), MGX (the UAE's AI fund), CapitalG, and the UK Sovereign AI Fund.
State-backed AI capital used to flow mostly into chips and data centers. Now it's chasing biology.
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Isomorphic calls its main platform IsoDDE - software that figures out which molecules might become real medicines, before anyone steps into a lab.
The science that started it all was AlphaFold, the DeepMind protein-folding model that helped earn Hassabis a share of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. IsoDDE applies that same kind of AI to drug design.
The team has been validating the approach inside its own programs. It also has live drug-discovery deals with three big names in pharma: Novartis, Eli Lilly, and Johnson & Johnson.
Those three deals matter. Novartis, Lilly, and J&J don't sign research partnerships for fun - they sign them when they think the technology can save them years of trial and error.
Hassabis put it plainly: "Now that we have shown our approach is fundamentally sound, our focus is on scaling our technology to its full potential."
In plain English: the science works, and now they're trying to make it work at industrial scale.
Drug discovery has been one of the most expensive guesses in business for decades. Most candidates fail in the lab, and most of the rest fail in trials.
If Isomorphic can move that success rate even a few points higher, the economics of pharma start to change.
That's a big "if," but $2.1 billion in fresh capital, much of it from sovereign funds, says serious investors believe it's worth funding.
The next thing to watch is whether any of those Novartis, Lilly, or J&J partnerships move into the clinic.
A drug candidate from an AI-designed pipeline reaching a human trial would be a real milestone for the whole field, not just for Isomorphic.
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