Isomorphic Labs raises £1.5bn Series B led by Thrive Capital to scale AI drug design engine
May 12, 2026
Isomorphic Labs, the London-based drug discovery company spun out of Google DeepMind, has raised £1.5 billion ($2.1 billion) in a Series B round led by Thrive Capital, more than tripling its outside funding to roughly $2.6 billion since its first external raise in early 2025.
The company is trying to turn artificial intelligence into the primary engine of drug design rather than a peripheral tool. Most pharmaceutical R&D still relies on screening libraries of known molecules, an expensive process with high failure rates. Isomorphic's bet is that a unified AI system, trained on the underlying physics of how molecules interact with proteins, can generate novel drug candidates directly and shorten the path to viable medicines.
That system, called IsoDDE, builds on AlphaFold — the protein structure prediction model whose creators, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper, shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Where AlphaFold predicts how a protein folds, IsoDDE is designed to identify binding pockets, generate new molecules, and optimise across multiple properties such as selectivity and synthesisability. Internally Isomorphic uses the engine across its own therapeutic programmes, and externally it sells access through long-running collaborations with Novartis, Eli Lilly and Johnson & Johnson.
The company has grown to more than 350 staff across London, Cambridge, Massachusetts and Lausanne, and says the new funding will pay for headcount expansion across AI research, engineering, drug design and clinical development, plus the cost of moving its first internally designed candidates into the clinic. Hassabis, who continues to run Google DeepMind alongside Isomorphic and is joined at the company by President Max Jaderberg, has previously committed to a first human trial — that deadline slipped from end of 2025 to end of 2026, and a sizeable share of this round is essentially funding that push.
Alongside Thrive, which also led the company's $600 million Series A last year, the round drew in existing backers Alphabet and GV plus new investors MGX, Temasek, CapitalG and the UK Sovereign AI Fund — a sovereign-heavy syndicate spanning Abu Dhabi, Singapore, the United States and the UK. It is among the largest private financings ever raised by an AI drug discovery company, and a sign that sovereign capital is increasingly willing to underwrite long-horizon bets on AI applied to the life sciences.
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