Basecamp Research, a London-based startup using frontier AI models to design medicines, has raised £105 million in an oversubscribed Series C led by S32, with participation from Anthropic's Anthology Fund, Catalio Capital Management, European Tech Collective, Firebrand River Capital, Inception Fund, King Philanthropies, NATO Innovation Fund, NVIDIA, PostScriptum, Redalpine, The Rockefeller Foundation, Singular, Sovereign AI and True Ventures. Senior leaders from pharma, biotech and global industry also invested, including André Hoffmann, Vice-Chairman of Roche.
Aiming to develop cures for diseases that remain incurable, Basecamp designs medicines that reprogram the body to repair itself. Its first focus is in vivo cell therapy, which reprograms a patient's cells inside the body. Today's cell therapies are limited both in the complexity of what they can deliver and by a manufacturing process that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars per patient. Basecamp's platform pairs its EDEN models, which can design long and complex DNA sequences, with large serine recombinases that precisely integrate those sequences into the genome. The aim is to make cell therapies more sophisticated, more customisable and simpler to administer, with potential uses across cancer, autoimmune disease and more. Preclinical results have been strong across multiple modalities and disease areas.
Underpinning the platform is the Trillion Gene Atlas, described as the world's largest proprietary biological AI training dataset. Built with partners including NVIDIA, Anthropic, PacBio and Ultima Genomics, the Atlas draws on biological data collected through access and benefit-sharing partnerships in more than 30 countries across all seven continents. Rather than tackling a single scientific task, EDEN models aim to deliver a universal understanding of how DNA works across all of life, allowing them to generate potential therapeutic candidates directly from information about a disease. That approach has already been demonstrated through Basecamp's collaboration with Anthropic on Claude Science, and the models can design cell and gene therapies, enzymes and peptides.
Headquartered in London with offices and labs in Cambridge, MA, Basecamp has appointed Richard Pearce, formerly of Biogen, as Chief Business Officer to expand its pharmaceutical partnerships. Andy Conrad, General Partner at S32 and former CEO of Google's Verily, joins the Board of Directors.
The new funding will be used to train a new generation of EDEN models and advance a pipeline of AI-designed therapeutics towards clinical development.
We believe the future of medicine lies in reprogramming the body to repair itself. We design the models and the medicines to teach it how. AI-based approaches promise to change what's possible for patients who currently have few alternatives. This funding brings this technology closer to those who need it most.
AI is opening up new possibilities across every part of society, but perhaps nowhere is the potential more meaningful than in human health. The ability to combine AI, biological data and scientific insight could transform how we understand disease, discover medicines and ultimately improve and extend people's lives. Basecamp Research is building an important technology platform at the center of that opportunity.
The biotechnology revolution that began fifty years ago transformed how we make medicines. Personalised, AI-designed therapeutics represent the next transformation of that journey. Basecamp Research has built the full platform to deliver it, from biological data to trained models to designed therapies. This will be key in helping the industry to continue to innovate.
