London-based Basecamp Research has raised $140 million in Series C funding to develop a new generation of biological AI models and move its own AI-designed medicines toward clinical development.
The oversubscribed round was led by S32 and included NVIDIA, Menlo Ventures’ Anthology Fund, the NATO Innovation Fund, The Rockefeller Foundation, Sovereign AI and other investors. The financing brings Basecamp’s total funding to roughly $225 million, according to Tech.eu.
Basecamp is turning biological diversity into training data
Basecamp’s technology strategy begins with biological data rather than internet-scale text.
The company has built what it calls the Trillion Gene Atlas, a proprietary genomic dataset created from biological samples collected through access and benefit-sharing partnerships in more than 30 countries across all seven continents. Partners involved in building the dataset include NVIDIA, Anthropic, PacBio and Ultima Genomics.
Basecamp trains its EDEN biological foundation models on that information. Rather than focusing on a single biological task, the company says EDEN is intended to identify patterns across DNA and generate potential therapeutic candidates from information about a disease.
Independent reporting from SiliconANGLE describes EDEN as a 28-billion-parameter model trained using a dataset containing information on more than 100 billion genes.
That gives Basecamp a different kind of AI moat: not only model architecture, but access to biological information that competitors cannot simply scrape from the open web.
The funding pushes AI closer to actual therapies
The startup plans to use the new capital to train its next generation of EDEN models and advance a therapeutic pipeline beginning with in vivo cell therapy.
Instead of removing cells from a patient, modifying them in a laboratory and returning them, Basecamp’s approach is aimed at reprogramming a patient’s cells inside the body. The company says its models can design long DNA sequences that can then be paired with specialized enzymes capable of integrating those sequences into the genome.
Tech.eu reports that Basecamp wants to apply the technology to diseases including cancer and autoimmune conditions, while the company says it has already produced preclinical results across multiple disease areas and modalities.
Basecamp was founded by Glen Gowers and Oliver Vince, whose work grew from synthetic-biology and bioengineering research and an expedition to Iceland’s Vatnajökull ice cap where they carried out off-grid DNA sequencing.
Biological data is becoming AI infrastructure
The larger story is not simply another large AI funding round.
Much of the current AI industry competes for better compute and larger models. In biotechnology, exclusive scientific data may be just as valuable.
Basecamp is effectively treating biodiversity as training infrastructure. Its models depend on genetic information gathered across environments that conventional laboratory datasets may not represent.
That explains why investors from AI, healthcare and even strategic institutions are appearing in the same round.
For European founders, Basecamp illustrates another route to building defensible AI companies: rather than competing directly with frontier labs on general-purpose models, startups can own specialized data, scientific expertise and workflows that general models cannot easily reproduce.
The $140 million round therefore funds more than another biological model. It finances an attempt to turn proprietary knowledge of the natural world into medicines.
