Basecamp Research will train AI models on the world’s largest biological dataset and design new medicines.
Most AI drug-discovery companies train their models on the small slice of biology that’s already been studied to death: human genomes, known disease pathways, existing drug compounds. Basecamp Research is betting on something closer to the opposite.
The London-headquartered company has spent years building what it calls the Trillion Gene Atlas, a genomic dataset collected through partnerships in more than 30 countries across all seven continents, on the theory that most of nature’s biological information hasn’t been examined at all.
On 23 September, Basecamp announced it had closed an oversubscribed $140 million Series C round, led by S32, to train a new generation of its AI models, called EDEN, and push its pipeline of AI-designed therapeutics toward clinical development [1].
Reading biology to write medicine
“We believe the future of medicine lies in reprogramming the body to repair itself. We design the models and the medicines to teach it how,” said Glen Gowers, Basecamp’s co-founder and CEO. “AI-based approaches promise to change what’s possible for patients who currently have few alternatives.”
The distinction Basecamp draws is between AI trained for one narrow task and AI trained to understand biology broadly. EDEN models, the company says, aim for the latter: a general-purpose grasp of how DNA works across all forms of life, rather than a model built to solve one disease at a time. In practice, that means EDEN can be pointed at a new problem, say, a specific disease pathway, and generate therapeutic candidates directly, including cell and gene therapies, enzymes and peptides.
The first real-world application is in vivo cell therapy: reprogramming a patient’s own cells inside the body, rather than removing, modifying and reinfusing them, which is how most cell therapies work today at enormous cost. By pairing EDEN’s ability to design long, complex DNA sequences with large serine recombinases (molecular tools that can precisely insert those sequences into the genome), Basecamp hopes to make cell therapy simpler to manufacture and administer. The company says it has already produced strong preclinical results across multiple disease areas, though it hasn’t detailed specific data publicly.
Who’s backing it, and why that’s notable
The round drew a mix of investors that spans venture capital, sovereign wealth, and pharma veterans, including NVIDIA, Menlo Ventures’ Anthology Fund, the NATO Innovation Fund, and the Rockefeller Foundation, among others. André Hoffmann, vice-chairman of Roche, was one of the individual backers who weighed in publicly.
“The biotechnology revolution that began fifty years ago transformed how we make medicines,” Hoffmann said. “Personalized, AI-designed therapeutics represent the next transformation of that journey. Basecamp Research has built the full platform to deliver it, from biological data to trained models to designed therapies.”
Andy Conrad, a general partner at S32 and the former CEO of Google’s Verily, is joining Basecamp’s board as part of the round.
“AI is opening up new possibilities across every part of society, but perhaps nowhere is the potential more meaningful than in human health,” he said.
To build out its commercial side, Basecamp has also brought on Richard Pearce, previously at Biogen, as chief business officer, a sign the company is preparing to move from research platform toward pharma partnerships and, eventually, the clinic.
Basecamp’s framing, medicine that helps the body repair itself, sits close to the core ambition of longevity science: not just treating disease after it appears, but restoring the biological function that erodes with age in the first place.
Notably, the company’s Trillion Gene Atlas was built with partners including Anthropic, and Basecamp has already used Claude in its own drug-design work. Whether AI trained on the breadth of life’s biology can actually deliver safer, cheaper regenerative therapies is still an open question. But the amount of capital now betting on “yes” keeps growing.
