Isomorphic Labs raises $600 million to advance AI-designed drugs toward clinical trials

Isomorphic Labs, the drug-discovery company Google DeepMind spun out to commercialise AlphaFold-derived structure prediction, announced a $600 million funding round — its first from investors outside Alphabet. Thrive Capital led the round, with GV and follow-on capital from Alphabet also participating.

Isomorphic was founded by Hassabis in 2021 to commercialise the AlphaFold breakthrough for drug discovery, operating as a separate company from Google DeepMind though sharing its founder and much of its underlying science. AlphaFold 3, released the previous year, extended the original protein-folding model to predict the structure and interactions of proteins, DNA, RNA and small molecules — work for which Hassabis and colleague John Jumper shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Isomorphic pitches itself as building an AI-first drug design engine rather than running a conventional biotech pipeline, generating and screening candidate molecules computationally before laboratory validation.

The company said the new funding would go toward developing that engine further and advancing its own drug candidates, concentrated in oncology and immunology, into clinical development, alongside partnered programmes already under way with Eli Lilly and Novartis worth close to $3 billion combined in potential milestone payments. Hassabis said the round would “turbocharge the development of our next-generation AI drug design engine” and help move internal programmes into the clinic; Thrive’s Joshua Kushner said the company had “earned a rare position to define a new age of drug discovery and design.”

No Isomorphic-designed drug had yet entered human trials at the time of the announcement — the company’s public claims rested on structure-prediction capability and pharma partnerships rather than clinical results. The round nonetheless marked one of the largest external validations to date of the thesis that generative structure prediction could shorten drug discovery timelines, and placed Isomorphic among the best-funded AI-biotech companies as competition to commercialise protein-structure modelling intensified.