Isomorphic Labs raises $2.1B to turn AlphaFold into medicines

Isomorphic Labs has raised $2.1B, or roughly £1.6B, in its first outside funding round, the London company said. The round was led by Thrive Capital, with its parent Alphabet and the venture arm GV also taking part, and values Isomorphic as one of the best-funded AI drug-discovery companies in Europe.

The size of the round is the story. Isomorphic has never raised external money before, having been funded from inside Alphabet since it was spun out of Google DeepMind in 2021. A $2.1B first cheque is less a bet on a young startup than a bet that AlphaFold, the protein-structure system that won its DeepMind creators a share of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, can be turned into a working drug pipeline. Isomorphic says the money will fund its own drug programmes and its partnerships with the pharmaceutical firms Eli Lilly and Novartis.

For the UK, it is a rare example of a home-grown biotech built on frontier AI rather than one bolting AI onto an existing pipeline. It also keeps a piece of DeepMind’s most celebrated research commercialising in London rather than crossing the Atlantic, at a moment when much of the UK’s AI talent is being courted by better-funded American labs.

The science leans on a foundation model, a large general-purpose system trained once on a vast body of data and then adapted to many tasks. Where AlphaFold predicted the shape a protein folds into, Isomorphic’s newer models aim to predict how a candidate drug molecule and a target protein will interact, the step that decides whether a drug works. Getting that right through machine learning could cut years off the slow, expensive trial-and-error of the lab, though no AI-designed drug from the company has yet been proven in patients.