London and Boston-based Basecamp Research has closed a $140m Series C round to fund a new generation of its EDEN biological AI models and move a pipeline of AI-designed therapeutics towards clinical trials, with backing from NVIDIA, Anthropic's Anthology Fund, the NATO Innovation Fund and S32.
The oversubscribed round was led by S32, whose General Partner Andy Conrad, former CEO of Google's Verily, joins the board. Other participants include Catalio Capital Management, The Rockefeller Foundation, King Philanthropies, Sovereign AI, True Ventures and Redalpine, alongside senior figures from pharma and biotech including André Hoffmann, Vice-Chairman of Roche.
Basecamp's primary application is in vivo cell therapy: reprogramming a patient's cells inside the body rather than manufacturing them externally. Current ex vivo approaches can cost hundreds of thousands of pounds per patient. The company pairs its EDEN foundation model's ability to design long and complex DNA sequences with large serine recombinases to integrate them into the genome, aiming to make cell therapies more sophisticated and simpler to administer at lower cost.
"We believe the future of medicine lies in reprogramming the body to repair itself. We design the models and the medicines to teach it how," said Glen Gowers, co-founder and CEO of Basecamp Research. "AI-based approaches promise to change what's possible for patients who currently have few alternatives."
At the centre of the platform is the Trillion Gene Atlas, which Basecamp describes as the world's largest proprietary biological AI training dataset. Built with NVIDIA, Anthropic, PacBio and Ultima Genomics, the Atlas draws on data collected through benefit-sharing partnerships in more than 30 countries across all seven continents. EDEN models are trained on this dataset to recognise patterns across biology that commercial datasets do not cover.
To expand pharmaceutical partnerships, Basecamp has appointed Richard Pearce, formerly of Biogen, as Chief Business Officer. The company is headquartered in London with offices and labs in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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