Basecamp Research secured $60M and a partnership to advance genetic medicine
Basecamp Research, a startup building a comprehensive biological database for AI-powered biodiscovery, has partnered with Dr. David R. Liu's lab at MIT and Harvard's Broad Institute and raised $60 million in Series B funding to advance its platform and develop next-generation foundation models.
Basecamp Research is a startup working on developing the world's most comprehensive biological database to unlock AI systems that outperform the current state-of-the-art. Basecamp Research has built a commercial biodiscovery platform comprising over 100 biodiversity partners to reach this goal. The company holds mutually beneficial access and benefit-sharing partnerships that compensate local communities and landowners for the genetic data extracted from their resources.
The gathered data forms the core of Basecamp Research's Knowledge Graph, which, according to the company, features ten times more data than all comparable public databases. Basecamp Research has built performant deep learning models on top of its proprietary database and made them available to its commercial partners, which include several labs and top biopharmaceutical companies, to unlock applications such as protein and genome design.
The latest Basecamp Research partnership is with Dr. David R. Liu's laboratory, at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. The collaboration will advance the research into the development of molecules to enable the next generation of genetic therapeutics. Dr. Glen Gowers, co-founder and CEO of Basecamp Research, commented on the partnership, “In our collaboration, we bring together the Liu Lab's pioneering work in genome editing and leading wet-lab development expertise with Basecamp Research's proprietary datasets from around the globe and our in-house AI models designed to surpass the limits of human-based design.”
In parallel, Basecamp Research announced it raised $60 million in a Series B funding round led by Singular, with support from new investors S32, redalpine, André Hoffmann, Vice-Chairman of Roche, Feike Sijbesma, Chair of Royal Philips and Former CEO of DSM, and Paul Polman, former CEO of Unilever, and existing investors True Ventures and Hummingbird Ventures. The Series B round brings Basecamp Research raised funding to $85 million. The company will use the funds to continue to scale its impressive database and invest in resources to develop and train the next generation of foundation models.
