Hassabis raises $2.1B for AI drugs

Demis Hassabis’ Isomorphic Labs said on May 12 that it raised $2.1 billion in Series B funding, one of the largest recent financings for an artificial-intelligence drug developer. The London-based company said Thrive Capital led the round, with Alphabet, GV, MGX, Temasek, CapitalG and the UK Sovereign AI Fund also investing. The company said the money will be used to scale its AI drug design engine and push more drug programs toward human testing. The announcement followed a social-media post that tied the raise to a broader surge of investor interest in AI-led biotech and longevity companies. ### Why is Hassabis tied to this financing? Demis Hassabis is the founder and chief executive of Isomorphic Labs, which was spun out of Google DeepMind in 2021. Isomorphic says it is building machine-learning systems to design medicines by predicting how biological molecules interact and by generating candidate compounds. Alphabet is both Isomorphic’s parent and one of the investors in the new round, according to the company’s May 12 announcement. That structure helps explain why Hassabis’ name traveled with the financing even though the capital was raised by Isomorphic Labs rather than by DeepMind itself. ### What exactly did the company say it raised? Isomorphic Labs said it raised $2.1 billion in Series B funding on May 12. The company said the round was led by Thrive Capital and included existing backers Alphabet and GV as well as new investors MGX, Temasek, CapitalG and the UK Sovereign AI Fund. The May 12 announcement came after Isomorphic disclosed a $600 million external funding round on March 31, 2025. (isomorphiclabs.com) Taken together, those two financings account for at least $2.7 billion in disclosed external capital, though the company did not in its Series B announcement frame the figure as a cumulative total. ### What is Isomorphic Labs trying to build with that money? (isomorphiclabs.com) Isomorphic Labs said the capital will accelerate its shift “from pioneering novel AI models to applying them at scale,” according to the company announcement. The company said it plans to expand its AI drug design engine and advance a larger pipeline of programs toward the clinic. (isomorphiclabs.com) A February 10 company update said its drug design engine had moved “beyond AlphaFold” and was aimed at modeling biomolecular interactions with enough precision to support rational drug design on a computer. A May 8, 2024 company post on AlphaFold 3 said the model extended structure prediction beyond proteins alone to include interactions involving DNA, RNA, ligands, ions and post-translational modifications. (isomorphiclabs.com) ### How far along is the pharma side of the business? Isomorphic Labs announced strategic collaborations with Eli Lilly and Novartis on January 7, 2024, saying the two deals together could be worth nearly $3 billion excluding royalties. The company said both collaborations were multi-target and focused on small-molecule drug discovery. (isomorphiclabs.com) Novartis expanded its collaboration with Isomorphic on February 18, 2025, adding up to three additional research programs on the same financial terms as the original agreement, Isomorphic said. The company’s partnerships page also lists Johnson & Johnson as a collaborator. ### Where does the “$8.5 billion” longevity number come from? (isomorphiclabs.com) An X post cited in the prompt referred to more than $8.5 billion in total funding across longevity startups, but that figure did not come from Isomorphic Labs’ financing announcement. A separate longevity-investment analysis published by AltStreet said longevity biotech funding reached about $8.49 billion in 2024. (isomorphiclabs.com) That means the $2.1 billion Isomorphic raise and the $8.5 billion longevity figure describe different buckets of capital. One is a single company financing announced on May 12, 2026; the other is a sectorwide estimate covering longevity-focused startups. ### What should readers watch next? Isomorphic Labs said on May 12 that the new money would be used to move more programs toward the clinic, but it did not name a first trial date in that announcement. (altstreet.investments) The next concrete markers are likely to come from updates on its partnered programs with Eli Lilly, Novartis and Johnson & Johnson, or from any company disclosure of an internal candidate entering human studies. (isomorphiclabs.com)