Frontier AI biotech company Basecamp Research has raised $140 million in a Series C round as it moves to train a new generation of biological AI models and push a pipeline of AI-designed therapeutics toward clinical development.

 

The oversubscribed financing, led by S32, brings together investors spanning technology, biotech, pharma and institutional capital. Participants include Menlo Ventures' Anthology Fund, Catalio Capital Management, European Tech Collective, Firebrand River Capital, Inception Fund, King Philanthropies, NATO Innovation Fund, NVIDIA, PostScriptum, Redalpine, The Rockefeller Foundation, Singular, Sovereign AI and True Ventures.

 

Basecamp says the funding will accelerate its effort to develop medicines designed to reprogram the body to repair itself, combining frontier AI models trained on proprietary biological data with technology capable of writing DNA sequences into cells.

 

"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. This funding brings this technology closer to those who need it most."

 

The company is now applying its biological foundation model, EDEN, to in vivo cell therapy—an approach aimed at reprogramming a patient's cells directly inside the body.

 

Basecamp says current cell therapies face limitations in both the complexity of treatments they can deliver and the manufacturing processes required to produce them, which can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars per patient.

 

Its platform combines EDEN's ability to design long, complex DNA sequences with large serine recombinases capable of precisely integrating those sequences into the genome. The company says the approach could enable more sophisticated and customizable cell therapies while simplifying how they are administered, with potential applications spanning cancer, autoimmune disease and other conditions.

 

Basecamp says it has generated strong preclinical results across multiple modalities and disease areas. The company is also looking to expand its pharmaceutical partnerships and has appointed Richard Pearce, formerly of Biogen, as Chief Business Officer.

 

André Hoffmann, Vice-Chairman of Roche, who participated in the financing, said: "The biotechnology revolution that began fifty years ago transformed how we make medicines. Personalised, AI-designed therapeutics represent the next transformation of that journey. Basecamp Research has built the full platform to deliver it, from biological data to trained models to designed therapies. This will be key in helping the industry to continue to innovate."

 

Andy Conrad, General Partner at S32 and former CEO of Google’s Verily, is joining Basecamp's Board of Directors.

 

“AI is opening up new possibilities across every part of society, but perhaps nowhere is the potential more meaningful than in human health. The ability to combine AI, biological data and scientific insight could transform how we understand disease, discover medicines and ultimately improve and extend people’s lives. Basecamp Research is building an important technology platform at the center of that opportunity.”

 

At the core of Basecamp's technology is the Trillion Gene Atlas, which the company describes as the world's largest proprietary biological AI training dataset.

 

Built with partners including NVIDIA, Anthropic, PacBio and Ultima Genomics, the Atlas draws on biological data collected through access and benefit-sharing partnerships spanning more than 30 countries across all seven continents.

 

Basecamp says its EDEN models, trained on this dataset, are designed to identify patterns across previously unseen biology and develop a broader understanding of how DNA functions across living systems.

 

Rather than targeting a single scientific task, the company is positioning EDEN as a general-purpose biological foundation model capable of generating potential therapeutic candidates from information about a disease.

 

The models have already been used to explore the design of cell and gene therapies, enzymes and peptides, including through Basecamp's collaboration with Anthropic on Claude Science.

 

The latest financing gives Basecamp additional capital to scale the underlying AI models, advance its therapeutic programs and move its technology closer to clinical testing.