Isomorphic Labs, the Google DeepMind spin-out focused on AI-driven drug discovery, secured $2.1 billion in funding last week, in a round that drew participation from the UK’s Sovereign AI Fund alongside major international investors.
Funding and Investors
The Series B round was led by Thrive Capital, a venture firm that also led the company’s first external fundraising in March 2025. Existing backers Alphabet and GV – Google’s venture capital arm – contributed again, alongside new investors including MGX, Temasek, CapitalG, and the UK Sovereign AI Fund. Isomorphic Labs raised $600 million in that earlier round, bringing the total raised to date to approximately $2.68 billion. The company’s valuation following the Series B has not been disclosed.
Alphabet, the parent company of Google, retains a majority stake in Isomorphic Labs. That ownership structure has prompted questions about the degree of real British control over a firm headquartered in London and widely described as a “British AI darling”. The UK Sovereign AI Fund’s participation was framed by the government as part of a strategy to support “strategically significant AI companies” to scale within Britain, but some investors remain sceptical about the fund’s ability to shift ownership away from Silicon Valley.
Ownership and UK Ties
Isomorphic Labs was founded in 2021 as a spin-out from Google DeepMind, which itself was acquired by Alphabet in 2014. The company is based in London, with additional premises in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Lausanne, Switzerland. Its chief executive is Sir Demis Hassabis, also CEO of Google DeepMind and a Nobel laureate in Chemistry (2024) for his work on AlphaFold 2. The president is Max Jaderberg, formerly chief AI officer; the chief scientific officer is Miles Congreve; and the chief technology officer is Sergei Yakneen.
The participation of the Sovereign AI Fund comes with ancillary benefits for backed companies, including fast-tracked visa decisions for research and development talent and access to compute power. The UK has the third-largest AI market globally and hosts more AI startups than any other European country. Isomorphic Labs is regarded as one of Britain’s leading AI companies, yet its majority ownership by a US tech giant complicates the narrative of a purely domestic success story.
AI Drug Discovery and Pipeline
The company’s mission is to “reimagine and accelerate drug discovery using AI”, aiming to solve all diseases by treating biology as an information processing system. At the core of its work is a unified AI drug design engine, IsoDDE, which is built on proprietary AI models that operate across multiple therapeutic areas and drug modalities. The engine leverages DeepMind’s AlphaFold technology, particularly AlphaFold 3, which models the structures and interactions of all of life’s molecules.
The fresh funding will be used to develop and deploy IsoDDE further, accelerating Isomorphic Labs’ internal pipeline of therapeutic programmes towards clinical trials. The company’s internal work is focused on oncology, immunology and inflammation. It expects to run its first clinical trials by the end of 2026, a timeline that has been revised from an earlier target of end-2025. Colin Murdoch, former president, indicated in July 2025 that human trials were “very close” and that preclinical work had begun.
Isomorphic Labs has also secured significant pharmaceutical partnerships. In January 2024 it struck a deal with Eli Lilly, potentially worth up to $1.7 billion, to discover small-molecule therapeutics using AlphaFold-driven AI. A separate partnership with Novartis was announced at the same time, valued at up to $3 billion combined with the Eli Lilly deal, for undisclosed targets. A collaboration with Johnson & Johnson is also in place.
The AI drug discovery market is estimated to be worth $4.5 billion by 2028. Isomorphic Labs faces competition from a range of startups including Recursion Pharmaceuticals, Insilico Medicine, Schrödinger, Exscientia, Owkin, Atomwise, Valo Health, XtalPi, and Healx. Meta Flux is also developing systems for automating biological research and drug development. The company differentiates itself with a comprehensive platform approach targeting enterprise buyers and a focus on de novo drug design, aiming to break from traditional “target-specific, siloed” workflows by building generalizable AI models.
To strengthen its team, Isomorphic Labs has actively recruited researchers and engineers from rival AI drug discovery firms such as Exscientia and BenevolentAI, both of which have faced workforce reductions. The company currently employs approximately 371 people.
