Artificial Intelligence
Basecamp Research raises $140 million for biological AI
The London company said new funding would support EDEN, its biological AI models, and therapy programmes built from its own data collected with partners across more than 30 countries.
- Basecamp Research said it raised $140 million in a round led by S32.
- The company said Nvidia, Anthropic's Anthology Fund, the NATO Innovation Fund and Redalpine also joined the round.
- Basecamp said EDEN-7 was tested in mice with multidrug-resistant bacteria, in work with University of Pennsylvania researchers led by Cesar de la Fuente.
- As of September 2026, Basecamp's published pipeline listed six programmes, none beyond lead optimisation.
Basecamp Research said it closed a $140 million financing round and named S32 as the lead investor. It said Nvidia, Anthropic's Anthology Fund, the NATO Innovation Fund and Redalpine also participated.
The company said it had built EDEN from samples gathered with local partners in places including rainforest soil, volcanic ground and the deep sea off Antarctica. Lorenz said the dataset held about 15 trillion DNA tokens and argued that biology needed far more data than public repositories provided.
Basecamp said EDEN had produced an antibiotic candidate called EDEN-7. A June company announcement said tests in mice with multidrug-resistant bacteria put it near the effect of a last-resort antibiotic, and the work involved researchers at the University of Pennsylvania led by Cesar de la Fuente.
For therapy work, Basecamp said EDEN was being used to design tools such as large serine recombinases for inserting DNA at set locations in human cells. Its published pipeline listed six programmes in September 2026, none beyond lead optimisation.
Named in this story
People
- Philip Lorenz
- was Basecamp's chief technology officer and the interview subject
- Cesar de la Fuente
- led the University of Pennsylvania researchers on the EDEN-7 work
- Jill Banfield
- was brought in to scrutinise the synthetic gut microbiome work
Companies
- Basecamp Research
- raised the funding round and said it would use the money for EDEN and therapy work
- S32
- was said by Basecamp to have led the round
- Nvidia
- took part in the financing
- Redalpine
- took part in the financing
- Microsoft
- published a case study on Basecamp and provided Azure compute for model training
Organisations
- Anthropic's Anthology Fund
- took part in the financing
- NATO Innovation Fund
- took part in the financing
- University of Pennsylvania
- hosted researchers who worked with Basecamp on the EDEN-7 work
- UC Berkeley
- supplied a microbiome researcher who reviewed a synthetic gut microbiome result
Products and systems
- EDEN
- was Basecamp's biological AI model family
- EDEN-7
- was the antibiotic candidate Basecamp said it tested in mice
- Trillion Gene Atlas
- was the planned data effort Basecamp said would support EDEN
How the source tells it
The register was mostly explanatory and company-led, with promotional scale comparisons and ambition language tempered by caveats about early-stage results.
- vendor boosterism company-led framing and repeated presentation of its own funding and results claims
- novelty headline framing and repeated comparisons that cast biology as a new training-data frontier