Isomorphic Labs raises $2.1B for AI-enabled drug discovery drive

London-based Isomorphic spun off from DeepMind, an AI business owned by Google’s parent company, in 2021. Building on DeepMind’s use of AI system AlphaFold 2 to predict protein structures, the startup set itself the goal of reimagining drug discovery in light of emerging capabilities. Isomorphic later opened an office in Switzerland, raised $600 million and partnered with Eli Lilly, Novartis and Johnson & Johnson. 

Isomorphic, which European Biotechnology Magazine named as its top startup to watch in 2026, has now raised more money. The series B round positions Isomorphic to keep developing and deploying its AI drug design engine, IsoDDE. Isomorphic, which opened a site in Massachusetts last year, plans to scale globally, including by hiring AI, engineering, drug design and clinical employees across its sites.

The plan reflects Isomorphic’s belief that scaling globally is crucial to its long-term vision of applying AI to complex biological and medical challenges to address the global burden of disease. The vision has informed Isomorphic’s use of its technology to discover drug candidates for internal development.

Isomorphic’s financing will support the progression of its pipeline, although few details are available. The company’s internal drug candidate pipeline is focused on cancer and immunology, Isomorphic said on its website, but details such as the lead indications, targets and modalities are yet to emerge. Isomorphic designed its platform to work across multiple therapeutic areas and drug modalities.

Validating the platform

Isomorphic published a technical report on its IsoDDE platform in February. While AlphaFold 3 advanced the prediction of structures, Isomorphic found limitations in the tool’s ability to generalize to unexplored regions of molecular space, estimate binding affinity and find binding sites on previously uncharacterized protein surfaces.

The limitations informed the development of IsoDDE. Isomorphic said the platform enables structure-based drug design on the most difficult targets across multiple modalities, allowing it to prioritize molecules with much higher confidence.

IsoDDE more than doubled the accuracy of AlphaFold 3 on a protein-ligand generalization benchmark, Isomorphic said, and accurately identified novel binding sites. Finding binding sites could enable the targeting of proteins previously regarded as undruggable.

The claimed benefits span modalities. IsoDDE beat existing biologics models, improving antibody-antigen interface prediction and CDR-H3 loop modeling, Isomorphic said. Applied to small molecule binders, the platform’s affinity predictions exceeded gold-standard, physics-based methods, according to Isomorphic.

Thrive Capital led the series B round with support from existing investors Alphabet and its venture capital arm GV. New investors MGX, Temasek, CapitalG and the U.K.’s Sovereign AI Fund also participated in the financing.