Switch off the editor’s digest free of charge
Roula Khalaf, editor of the FT, selects her favorite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Isomorpha laboratories, the start-up of the drug discovery from the Deepmind Artificial Intelligence Unit from Google, collected $ 600 million in its first external round of financing, since investors rely on the potential for AI to “solve diseases”.
The fundraising for the group based in London, whose managing director Sir Demis Hassabis is, was led by Thrive Capital, the investor based in New York, who is also one of the greatest supporters of the Chatgpt Maker Openaai.
The round announced on Monday was also accompanied by GV, the risk capital arm of Alphabet, the parent company of Google. It also included further investments from Alphabet.
No further financial details, such as the evaluation of the Isomorphic laboratories and the new owner structure, have not been announced. However, alphabet remains the majority shareholder.
The fundraiser is one of the largest for a British AI company and offers a financial thrust as Hate Regulations of having medication that AI designed in clinical studies until the end of the year.
“This financing will continue to invoice our next generation to develop our Ki-drug design engine, help us to advance our own programs into clinical development, and is a significant step forward towards our mission to solve all diseases with the help of AI,” he said.
The company said that the investment would help accelerate AI research and development in the drug design and enable the company to expand its team.
“We believe that Isomorph has a rare position to define a new age of the discovery and design of drugs, and we are deeply inspired by their mission and the extraordinary progress that you have made so far,” said Josh Kushner, founder and managing director of Thrive Capital.
Isomorphic laboratories were ejected Deepmind In 2021 and since then he has worked with large pharmaceutical companies such as Novartis and Eli Lilly, who want to reduce the costs and develop drugs faster.
In May last year, Deepmind Alphafold 3, a AI model, revealed the structures of the genetic code -dna and RNA and ligands, which are molecules that can bind to others and be important disease markers. The researchers of isomorphic laboratories use the tool and proprietary AI models to carry out predictions and simulate the development of drugs.
In the first year of the company of the company in 2023 reported losses Of 60 million GBP, compared to 17 million GBP in the previous year, according to the last accounts submitted to Companies House. ISOMORPHE Labors also reported that the F&E costs from GBP 12 million had grown to 49 million GBP and the employee costs with a workforce from 71 GBP tripled to 20 million GBP.
Hassabis, who last October the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for the development of Alphafold, a AI tool that can predict the structure of the proteins: “For a long time I have the feeling that improvement in human health is the most important thing we can take with AI and today marks a big step towards a new era of drug recognition.”
