Alphabet's Isomorphic Labs Reportedly Raising $2B+ for Medical AI

Isomorphic Labs, the Alphabet unit using artificial intelligence to accelerate drug development, is reportedly in talks to raise more than $2 billion in new funding. Thrive Capital, an existing investor and backer of OpenAI, is expected to lead the round, with Alphabet also contributing.

The company spun off from Google DeepMind in 2021 and is led by Demis Hassabis, who shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing the AI model AlphaFold 2. That algorithm predicts protein structures, a task that once required years of manual work.

In 2024, DeepMind and Isomorphic Labs released AlphaFold 3, which delivers over 50% accuracy improvement on certain research tasks, particularly in analyzing small molecules that form the basis of many drugs.

Isomorphic Labs’ flagship product, the IsoDDE, automates manual research workflows to speed up drug development. On the Runs N’ Poses benchmark, IsoDDE more than doubled AlphaFold 3’s score on the most difficult tasks. It also requires less data to find binding pockets in proteins, reducing preparatory work.

The funds will reportedly be used to enhance IsoDDE and expand the company’s international presence.