Isomorphic Labs Raises $600M to Advance AI Drug Design and Enter Clinical Trials
March 31, 2025
Isomorphic Labs, the London-based AI drug design company spun out of Google DeepMind in 2021, has raised $600 million in its first ever external funding round. The round is led by Thrive Capital, with participation from GV (formerly Google Ventures) and follow-on capital from existing investor Alphabet, the company's parent.
The raise marks a significant coming-of-age moment for one of the UK's most ambitious deep tech ventures. Founded by AI pioneer Sir Demis Hassabis — who simultaneously runs Google DeepMind — Isomorphic was built on the premise that the same mathematical structures underpinning machine learning and biology could be harnessed to redesign how drugs are discovered. Its name reflects this belief in a fundamental symmetry between information science and life.
At the core of Isomorphic's platform is a unified AI drug design engine built on foundational models capable of working across multiple therapeutic areas and drug modalities. The company co-developed AlphaFold 3 with Google DeepMind, released in May 2024 — a revolutionary model that can predict the structure and interactions of all of life's molecules with unprecedented accuracy. For this work, Hassabis and DeepMind collaborator John Jumper received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2024.
The company has partnered with pharmaceutical giants Eli Lilly and Novartis in deals worth up to $3 billion in combined milestones, and has expanded its Novartis collaboration to cover additional research programmes. Alongside these partnerships, Isomorphic is developing its own internal pipeline of drug candidates focused on oncology and immunology — and the $600 million raise is intended to drive those programmes into human clinical trials. President Colin Murdoch has confirmed the company is staffing up and is close to dosing its first patients.
Joshua Kushner, founder and CEO of Thrive Capital, said Isomorphic has earned a rare position to define a new age of drug discovery. Hassabis himself has described the mission plainly: "One day we hope to be able to say — here's a disease, and then click a button and out pops the design for a drug to address that disease."
The funding will also support expansion of the team at Isomorphic's King's Cross, London headquarters and its Lausanne, Switzerland office, as the company enters what it describes as its next phase of growth.
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