DeepMind spinout Isomorphic Labs, which is working on AI-designed drugs, has raised $2.1bn led by US venture firm Thrive Capital.
The UK’s Sovereign AI fund, Abu Dhabi’s MGX, Alphabet venture arm GV and Singapore’s Temasek also participated in the Series B, which comes a year after the company’s first external capital raise.
It secured a $600m raise in May last year, led by Thrive Capital and GV.
Isomorphic launched in 2021 when it spun out from Google DeepMind, the US tech giant’s AI research lab. Isomorphic is the brainchild of Colin Murdoch, the company’s former president, and DeepMind founder and CEO Demis Hassabis.
Isomorphic is building a drug discovery platform using its sister company’s groundbreaking AlphaFold technology, an AI system which predicts the structure of proteins.
It competes with a number of other companies aiming to do the same, including OpenAI, which released a life sciences model earlier this year.
Isomorphic's former president Murdoch spoke to Sifted last year about the rationale of spinning the company out of DeepMind.
He said the company needed a different mix of staff than DeepMind, which at its core is a mix of machine learning researchers, engineers and product managers.
If you’re designing drugs, you need chemists, pharmacologists and biologists, Murdoch said, and there wasn’t a career ladder for these types of people at DeepMind.
Spinning out allowed the company to set a clearer mission than it would have been able to in DeepMind, he said, as well as allowing it to create a distinct culture.
Isomorphic has signed deals with pharmaceutical firms including Eli Lilly and Novartis. Last year, Hassabis told Bloomberg that Isomorphic would enter clinical trials with proposed drugs by the end of last year. He has since told the publication he was referring to pre-clinical trials, which the company has started.
