AI drug discovery firm Isomorphic Labs has completed the company’s first external funding round since its 2021 founding within Google parent company Alphabet, raising $600 million to advance its programs spanning multiple therapeutic areas.
The round was led by Thrive Capital with participation from Google’s GV and follow-on capital from Alphabet.
Isomorphic will use the windfall to fund development of its next-generation artificial intelligence drug design model, the company announced in a March 31 release. The AI biotech is also looking to expand its team as it grows.
"This funding will further turbocharge the development of our next-generation AI drug design engine, help us advance our own programs into clinical development, and is a significant step forward towards our mission of one day solving all disease with the help of AI," Demis Hassabis, Ph.D., Isomorphic’s co-founder and CEO, said in the release.
Isomorphic builds AI models to design potential drugs, most recently AlphaFold 3, a Google DeepMind-partnered model that can predict the structures and interactions of molecules. Hassabis, along with DeepMind collaborator John Jumper, Ph.D., won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for work on AlphaFold.
In January 2024, Isomorphic inked two deals with Eli Lilly and Novartis worth up to nearly $3 billion combined. Both Big Pharma companies tasked Isomorphic with using AlphaFold to discover small molecules for undisclosed targets. In addition to these partnerships, Isomorphic is also working on wholly owned internal programs, according to the release.
In March 2024, analysts from Pitchbook called Isomorphic “the bellwether for future AI biotech startup funding.” By now raising more than half a billion dollars, Isomorphic has shown that investor interest in AI is still strong—especially if the company is backed by Nobel Prize-winning science.