Last Updated: 13 May 2026
Isomorphic Labs, a London-based company that uses artificial intelligence to design new medicines, has raised $2.1 billion in Series B funding. Founded in 2021 by Sir Demis Hassabis, who received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2024 for his work on protein structure prediction, the company has built what it calls an AI drug design engine: a system of proprietary AI models that predicts how drug compounds interact with biological targets, with the goal of making the drug discovery process faster and more accurate.
Developing a new drug is one of the most expensive undertakings in science. The average cost of bringing a single drug to approval sits at around $2.6 billion, once you account for all the programs that fail along the way, and the process typically takes 10 to 15 years. Close to 90% of drug candidates fail before they reach patients. That persistent failure rate has pushed pharmaceutical companies and investors alike toward AI tools that can filter out poor candidates earlier. The global market for AI in drug discovery is projected to grow from $6.0 billion in 2025 to $25.0 billion by 2035, a compound annual growth rate of 12.6%.
The Series B round is led by Thrive Capital, the New York-based venture firm that also led Isomorphic's previous raise. Alphabet and GV, both existing investors, participated again. New backers include MGX, Temasek, CapitalG, and the UK Sovereign AI Fund.
Finding a working drug is not a matter of testing a few promising molecules. The human body contains thousands of proteins, and a drug compound must bind to the right one precisely, without triggering harmful effects elsewhere. For decades, the standard approach has been to test thousands of compounds individually in the laboratory, one after another. It is thorough, but it is also slow and costly.
AI shifts the starting point. Machine learning models can be trained on existing biological data to predict, computationally, which compounds are likely to work before any physical testing begins. That means research teams can narrow the field early, focusing lab work on the candidates most likely to succeed. For investors, this is meaningful because it targets the root cause of the industry's high failure rate rather than addressing its symptoms downstream.
"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," said Dr. Krishna Yeshwant, Managing Partner at GV. "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."
Dr. Krishna Yeshwant, Managing Partner at GV
The funding will go toward three areas. The first is continued development of IsoDDE, the company's AI drug design engine, which has already been used across internal research programs and which Isomorphic plans to expand further. The second is hiring: the company is adding staff in AI research, engineering, drug design, and clinical development across its offices in London, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Lausanne.
The third area is the most consequential. Isomorphic wants to move its most promising drug candidates into clinical trials, meaning actual testing in human patients. Everything up to that point, however sophisticated, is still a prediction. Clinical trials are where results get confirmed or rejected.
"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," said Max Jaderberg, President of Isomorphic Labs. "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."
Max Jaderberg, President of Isomorphic Labs
Isomorphic Labs grew out of Google DeepMind, the AI research lab Hassabis co-founded. The company's scientific foundation is AlphaFold, the AI system developed at DeepMind that solved a longstanding biological problem: predicting the three-dimensional shape that a protein folds into from its sequence of amino acids. That capability became the basis on which Isomorphic built IsoDDE.
IsoDDE is designed to work across multiple disease areas and drug types. According to the company, it offers what the press release describes as "predictive fidelity required to navigate novel biological systems with unprecedented accuracy," forming a scalable base for AI-assisted drug design. Isomorphic recently published work detailing a portion of IsoDDE's capabilities, including new features that connect structural protein prediction to practical drug discovery applications.
The leadership team combines scientific depth with operational experience. Hassabis is Founder and CEO; Max Jaderberg, a former DeepMind researcher, serves as President. The company also has a Chief Medical Officer, Chief Scientific Officer, and Chief Research Officer. Its scientific advisory board includes Nobel laureates Jennifer Doudna, Sir David MacMillan, Venki Ramakrishnan, and Sir Paul Nurse.
Isomorphic raised $600 million in its first external funding round in March 2025, led by Thrive Capital, with GV and Alphabet participating. The Series B brings total external capital raised to $2.7 billion.
The investor group spans several continents. Thrive Capital is a New York-based venture firm; Alphabet and GV have backed Isomorphic since its first external round; Temasek is Singapore's state investment company; MGX is an Abu Dhabi government-backed AI and technology investment firm; CapitalG is Alphabet's independent growth fund; and the UK Sovereign AI Fund represents a direct government investment in a British AI company.
"We are humbled to have the opportunity to continue to support Isomorphic's mission to solve all disease," said Joshua Kushner, Founder and CEO of Thrive Capital. "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."
Joshua Kushner, CEO of Thrive Capital
Isomorphic also holds active research partnerships with Novartis, Eli Lilly, and Johnson & Johnson. Under those arrangements, the pharma companies use IsoDDE within their own discovery programs, generating revenue for Isomorphic alongside its internally owned drug pipeline.
