The DeepMind spin-out building an AI drug design engine — backed by $2.7B+ and Big Pharma deals
HQ: London, United Kingdom | Founded: 2021 | Employees: ~200 (2026, est.) | Stage: Late Stage VC (Series B) | Website: https://www.isomorphiclabs.com
Isomorphic Labs was founded in November 2021 as an independent company spun out of Google DeepMind, with DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis as founder and CEO. Its mission is deliberately grand: use computational AI to rethink drug discovery from first principles — rather than merely accelerate existing workflows. The company builds IsoDDE (Isomorphic Drug Design Engine), a suite of AI models that design, predict, and optimize molecules across the drug discovery pipeline, from target understanding to candidate molecules.\n\nIsomorphic's breakthrough moment for credibility came in January 2024 when it announced landmark partnerships with Eli Lilly and Novartis — deals structured around R&D funding plus success-based milestones that analysts estimated could be worth up to ~$3B combined. The company followed with its first external funding: a $600M Series A (May 2025), and then a $2.1B Series B in May 2026 led by Thrive Capital, with Alphabet, GV, MGX, Temasek, CapitalG, and the UK government's sovereign investment vehicle participating — bringing total capital to roughly $2.7B and making it one of the most-funded AI biotechs ever.\n\nOperationally, Isomorphic runs like an AI lab crossed with a biotech: deep research collaborations with Google DeepMind and Alphabet compute resources, an expanding pipeline of internal drug programs (its first candidates have entered preclinical and early clinical development), and a platform built to be reused across every partnership. With Hassabis's Nobel-Prize-level credibility and Alphabet's balance sheet, Isomorphic is the flagship of the AI-native drug discovery category.
Isomorphic Labs is the purest expression of the 'AI-first drug discovery' thesis: a DeepMind spin-out, founded by Demis Hassabis himself, applying frontier AI directly to molecular drug design. Its IsoDDE engine has already attracted two of pharma's biggest names — Eli Lilly and Novartis — in deals potentially worth ~$3B in milestones, and the $2.1B Series B (May 2026, led by Thrive Capital with Alphabet, GV, Temasek, and MGX) made it the best-capitalized AI biotech in the world. The bull case is the AlphaFold pedigree, Alphabet backing, and a platform approach that compounds across every program it touches; the bear case is that AI-designed drugs still have to clear clinical trials — the real test — and that rivals (Recursion, Xaira, EvolutionaryScale, big-pharma internal AI) are racing the same goal.
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