Basecamp Research raised an oversubscribed $140 million Series C led by S32. Its AI models are trained on a proprietary gene dataset that the two AI companies helped develop.
Basecamp Research has a new set of investors that were already part of its supply chain.
The company, which designs therapies with artificial intelligence, raised $140 million in an oversubscribed Series C led by S32. Anthropic invested, as did NVentures, Nvidia's venture capital arm. Both companies also helped develop the Trillion Gene Atlas, the proprietary biological dataset Basecamp uses to train its models, along with PacBio and Ultima Genomics.
The round is more than double the $60 million Series B Basecamp raised in 2024, which followed a $20 million Series A in 2022. The three disclosed rounds add up to $220 million. The investor list runs well beyond the lead: Menlo Ventures through its Anthology Fund, the NATO Innovation Fund, the Rockefeller Foundation, True Ventures, Redalpine and Catalio, among others. André Hoffmann, vice chairman of Roche, invested personally.
Basecamp's models, called EDEN, are aimed at in vivo cell therapies, which are meant to reprogram cells inside the body. The company is focusing on cancer and autoimmune disease. It says the models achieved a 63.2% functional hit rate across a range of DNA prompts, and that half of the large serine recombinases EDEN generated were active in human cells. Its data comes from access and benefit-sharing agreements in more than 30 countries.
"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, the co-founder and chief executive. Basecamp plans to spend the money on its next EDEN models and on the therapies they produce. Andy Conrad of S32 joins the board.
The overlap between investor and partner is the part worth watching. When the companies that build the chips and the models also fund the startup that uses both, they gain a stake in the result as well as a showcase for their technology. For Basecamp, it brings capital from the firms whose tools it depends on most. The round also lands in the same week that Enveda, another AI-driven drug developer, raised $311 million, a sign that investors are backing the category with large checks.
The test for any AI drug platform is the clinic, not the hit rate. The first Basecamp therapy to enter human trials, and the time it takes to get there, will show whether EDEN's laboratory results translate into medicines.