Isomorphic Labs raises £1.5bn to push IsoDDE AI-designed drugs into clinical trials
This article covers Isomorphic Labs, a London biotech startup, which has raised £1.5bn in a series B funding round led by Thrive Capital. The funding will scale its IsoDDE AI drug design engine, advance multiple therapeutic programmes towards the clinic and expand hiring across AI, engineering, drug design and clinical teams, supporting AI-driven drug discovery and the UK biotech ecosystem.
Isomorphic Labs, a London biotech startup, has raised £1.5bn in a series B funding round led by Thrive Capital. The capital will be used to scale its IsoDDE AI drug design engine, advance multiple therapeutic programmes towards the clinic and expand hiring across AI, engineering, drug design and clinical teams — a substantial vote of confidence in the company’s AI-first approach to drug discovery.
Why it matters
A £1.5bn series B in 2026 is notable for both size and signal. It underlines sustained investor appetite for companies that combine large language-model style AI with structural biology, while also marking a major allocation of private capital into AI-driven biotech from a global investor base. For the UK ecosystem, the deal — which includes participation from the UK Sovereign AI Fund — highlights growing public and private interest in retaining AI and biotech capabilities domestically.
The funding increases the odds that Isomorphic can move internal candidates into clinical development more quickly than traditionally paced programmes. That would be a practical test of whether the predictive gains the company claims for its platform translate into safer, more effective drug candidates and shorter development timelines.
Inside the product
Isomorphic’s platform, presented publicly as IsoDDE, combines several proprietary AI models aimed at predicting molecular and structural properties and designing candidate compounds. The company says these models bridge the gap between structure prediction and applied drug discovery, working across multiple therapeutic areas and drug modalities.
Isomorphic has published subsets of the engine’s capabilities, emphasising predictive accuracy and the ability to navigate novel biological systems. According to the company, internal programmes have already hit key milestones and identified viable candidates with greater speed than conventional methods. Those claims remain partial until candidates enter clinical trials and deliver outcome data, but they provide a concrete roadmap for how the funding will be spent: scaling compute and data infrastructure, broadening the pipeline and hiring specialist staff.
Who are the investors?
The round was led by Thrive Capital and included existing backers Alphabet and GV alongside new participants MGX, Temasek, CapitalG and the UK Sovereign AI Fund. That mix gives Isomorphic a combination of Silicon Valley venture capital, corporate capital from Alphabet and CapitalG, sovereign and institutional capital from Temasek, and a UK government-linked technology fund.
The backers cited different rationales: confidence in the team, the platform’s early performance and the potential to accelerate medicine discovery. The company also maintains strategic partnerships with major pharmaceutical groups such as Novartis, Lilly and Johnson & Johnson, which serve as industry validation and potential routes for co-development; these partnerships are relevant because they can provide real-world testing grounds and commercial channels if candidates progress.
In the announcement, Ruth Porat, President and Chief Investment Officer Alphabet and Google, said:
The application of AI in healthcare offers a profound opportunity. Isomorphic Labs has already made extraordinary progress in harnessing AI to accelerate drug discovery, and we are excited by this momentum and the early promise of the technology platform. This trajectory is encouraging, and this funding will be used to accelerate the work and bring important interventions to market with greater speed.
In the announcement, Joshua Kushner, Founder and CEO of Thrive Capital, said:
This funding round is a massive vote of confidence from a diverse group of top-tier international investors in our AI-first approach to drug design and development. Over the past year, our conviction in the team has only deepened as they've made significant progress in building a unified AI drug design engine to define a new age of drug discovery and design.
In the announcement, Dr. Krishna Yeshwant, Managing Partner at GV, said:
The caliber of the team Isomorphic has assembled is unmatched, and they continue to validate our belief that this is the premier group at the intersection of AI and drug discovery. We have strong confidence in Isomorphic. We believe their approach can create important medicines that will be better understood earlier in the process, pushing the boundaries of what’s been possible before.
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Founder perspective
In the announcement, Sir Demis Hassabis, Founder and CEO, said:
This funding round is a massive vote of confidence from a diverse group of top-tier international investors in our AI-first approach to drug design and development. Now that we have shown our approach is fundamentally sound, our focus is on scaling our technology to its full potential. This capital injection allows us to build out our drug design engine at scale, driving us forward in our mission to solve all disease.
In the announcement, Max Jaderberg, President of Isomorphic Labs, said:
This milestone is built on the strength of our AI drug design engine, which has already proven its worth across our internal programs by hitting key milestones and identifying viable candidates with unprecedented speed. Our drug design engine works, and it's giving us a repeatable way to design new medicines for a wide range of diseases, building a future of medicine that was previously out of reach.
The bigger picture
Large, capital-intensive rounds like this reflect two converging trends: growing investor conviction that AI can materially change early-stage drug discovery, and the consolidation of capital behind a smaller number of companies that combine advanced modelling, proprietary data and pharma partnerships. The real test will be translational: whether AI-designed candidates supported by this investment show clinical benefit and acceptable safety in human trials.
For the UK and European biotech ecosystems, the presence of the UK Sovereign AI Fund alongside major international investors is a reminder that governments are increasingly prepared to co-invest in strategically important AI and life-science capabilities. If Isomorphic’s pipeline advances to clinical readouts, it could accelerate follow-on investment in companies applying sophisticated computational approaches to biology.
This deal sits within a broader European push to keep AI and biotech talent and IP at home while also attracting global capital. The next 18 to 36 months will be decisive in showing whether the promise of predictive AI in drug discovery turns into medicines that reach patients.
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