Last week, Isomorphic Labs, the AI-first drug design company spun out of Alphabet's Google DeepMind and founded by DeepMind co-founder, Sir Demis Hassabis, announced it had raised $600 million in its first external funding round. The investment, led by Thrive Capital with participation from GV and follow-on capital from Alphabet, will accelerate the development of the company's next-generation AI drug design platform.

Isomorphic Labs has been active since 2021, when it was founded to reimagine pharmaceutical research by leveraging artificial intelligence, especially the AlphaFold platform, in drug discovery processes. Notably, the company developed AlphaFold 3, which was released in May 2024, in collaboration with Google DeepMind. AlphaFold 3 is a revolutionary model that can predict the structure and interactions of biological molecules with unprecedented accuracy, which earned Hassabis and DeepMind researcher John Jumper the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry (jointly with David Baker).

Additionally, Isomorphic Labs has created a drug discovery engine made out of several foundational models capable of working on multiple drug modalities and therapeutic areas. This drug discovery engine is at the heart of several partnerships that the London-headquartered company has established with pharmaceutical giants Eli Lilly and Novartis. Moreover, Isomporphic Labs also leverages its drug discovery engine to advance its internal programs focused primarily on oncology and immunology.

"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," said Hassabis. Concretely, this investment will support Isomorphic's expansion of its team as it enters its next growth phase, which the company expects will accelerate its R&D efforts and further advance its drug discovery engine.