Basecamp Research raises $140M, backed by Anthropic, Nvidia and the UK's Sovereign AI fund

Basecamp Research, a London company, has raised an oversubscribed $140M — about £104M — Series C to build AI foundation models of biology. The round was led by S32, the California firm founded by Bill Maris, who started Google’s venture arm GV. But the more telling detail is who joined it: Nvidia’s venture arm NVentures (a returning backer), Anthropic’s Anthology Fund (a new one), the NATO Innovation Fund, Rockefeller, Catalio, the European Tech Collective, and — notably for a UK story — the government’s Sovereign AI fund. The company has now raised $225M in total.

Basecamp’s bet is a contrarian one, and it is about data rather than model size. It has built what it calls the Trillion Gene Atlas, a proprietary genomic dataset assembled by sampling genetic diversity from nature through partnerships in more than 30 countries across all seven continents — the training data, in other words, that most biology models lack. On top of it sits EDEN, a family of models meant to give a general understanding of how DNA works across all of life, and which it uses to design cell and gene therapies, enzymes and peptides. The new money is aimed at training the next generation of those models and pushing an AI-designed therapeutic pipeline toward the clinic.

The investor list is the part worth dwelling on. Anthropic backing a startup directly, through its Anthology Fund, is unusual — the company is far more often the thing startups build on than a name on their cap table — and Nvidia doubling down signals the same conviction from the hardware side. That the UK’s Sovereign AI fund is in the round too fits the pattern we keep tracking: British public money going into the hard, science-heavy layers of AI — chips, drug discovery, biological models — rather than the consumer apps that raise on their own. Basecamp now sits alongside Isomorphic Labs and CuspAI as evidence that AI for science is one of the things the UK does genuinely well.

The honest caveat is the timeline. AI for biology is a long game: designing a molecule is not the same as an approved medicine, and Basecamp’s therapeutic pipeline is years from telling us whether the approach pays off in the clinic. But a proprietary data moat that is hard to replicate, and a cap table that pulls together Nvidia, Anthropic and the British state, make it one of the most watchable science-AI companies in the country — and a reminder that some of the most ambitious UK AI money is going into biology, not chatbots.