Basecamp Research has closed a $140M Series C to train a new generation of biological AI models and push AI-designed medicines toward clinical development.
S32, the firm founded by GV’s Bill Maris, led the round. Nvidia’s venture arm wrote another check, and Anthropic’s Anthology Fund came in as a first-time backer. Catalio and the NATO Innovation Fund are both new to the cap table. Rounding out the new-money group are the Rockefeller Foundation, European Tech Collective and the UK government’s Sovereign AI Fund, backers that add philanthropic, defense and state interest. Total funding now stands at $225M.
Eden is the name of its model family: biological foundation models fed on a genomic dataset that the company calls the largest of its kind in private hands, assembled with partners in over 30 countries. Glen Gowers and Oliver Vince started the business in London in 2019. Those models work alongside DNA-writing technology to design long genetic sequences and the enzymes that deliver them.
Reprogramming cells while they stay inside the patient, a technique known as in vivo cell therapy, is where the company is aiming first. As Basecamp frames it, the ceiling on cell therapy comes from two places: how complex a payload the cells can carry, and a production process whose cost reaches hundreds of thousands of dollars per patient.
Go back far enough and the story starts on Iceland’s Vatnajokull ice cap, on an expedition where the two founders, then students, set up what they call the first off-grid DNA sequencing operation. Strong preclinical readouts across a handful of disease areas came before this round, according to the company.
