"Now that we have shown our approach is fundamentally sound, our focus is on scaling our technology to its full potential," Hassabis said in a statement. "This capital injection allows us to build out our drug design engine at scale, driving us forward in our mission to solve all disease."
That timeline has slipped: Isomorphic Labs now aims to reach clinical trials before the close of 2026, pushing past the end-of-2025 deadline Hassabis had previously set for getting AI-designed drugs into testing. Hassabis told Bloomberg he "misspoke" and had been referring to pre-clinical trials, which the company has begun. He declined to name the drug or disease involved.
Isomorphic Labs was founded in 2021 as a spinout from Google $GOOGL DeepMind, Alphabet's AI research lab, with a focus on commercializing the AlphaFold protein-structure prediction model. The company holds partnerships with Novartis, Eli Lilly $LLY, and Johnson & Johnson $JNJ, the company said.
The 2025 Series A, which brought in $600 million, was likewise steered by Thrive Capital. Returning to a familiar backer rather than courting new ones was a deliberate choice, Hassabis told Bloomberg, citing the time and discretion required in his line of work. "We didn't want to spend months road-showing," he said.
A full separation from Alphabet at some point down the road has not been ruled out, Hassabis indicated to Bloomberg. "That's definitely one of the options," he said.
Ruth Porat, president and chief investment officer at Alphabet and Google, said in a statement that the funding will help bring treatments to market faster. "Isomorphic Labs has already made extraordinary progress in harnessing AI to accelerate drug discovery," she said, "and we are excited by this momentum and the early promise of the technology platform."
