- Google DeepMind spinout Isomorphic Labs is in advanced talks to raise more than $2 billion, with Thrive Capital set to lead and Alphabet participating
- The round comes after the company pushed its first clinical trials back a full year
- Partnerships with Eli Lilly and Johnson & Johnson give it Big Pharma validation few AI drug startups can match
London-based Isomorphic Labs, the drug discovery startup spun out of Google DeepMind, is reportedly in advanced talks to raise more than $2 billion in a new funding round, according to Bloomberg.
Thrive Capital, which led the company’s first external funding round last year, is expected to lead the financing again, while Alphabet is also participating, report says.
Founded in 2021 by DeepMind co-founder and Nobel Prize winner Demis Hassabis, Isomorphic Labs use
protein prediction and molecular modelling systems to help pharmaceutical companies identify drug targets and develop medicines faster. Its technology is based on AlphaFold, the protein structure prediction system developed at DeepMind.
In 2025, Isomorphic Labs raised $600 million in its first external funding round led by Thrive Capital, with participation from Alphabet and GV.
The core product is IsoDDE, known as the Isomorphic Drug Design Engine, which predicts how potential drug compounds will interact with proteins in the body. In plain terms: instead of scientists spending years manually testing thousands of compounds, the system narrows the search computationally. For example, a drug programme targeting a complex neurological disease might take decades using conventional methods. IsoDDE aims to cut that to years.
In terms of competition, Meta Flux is developing systems designed to automate biological research and drug development workflows. Other companies including Recursion Pharmaceuticals, Insilico Medicine and Exscientia are also using machine learning models for drug discovery and molecular research.
Unlike several rivals focused mainly on software tools, Isomorphic Labs combines DeepMind’s protein prediction technology with pharmaceutical partnerships with Eli Lilly in 2024 worth up to $1.7 billion, and has a separate collaboration with Johnson & Johnson , along drug design systems.
The $2 billion-plus raise would be more than triple the $600 million Isomorphic raised in its first external round in March 2025, which was led by Thrive with participation from GV and Alphabet. It would rank among the largest funding rounds ever for an AI drug discovery company globally.
The new capital will go toward strengthening IsoDDE and expanding the company’s international operations.
