Basecamp Research raises $140M Series C for AI-designed medicines

London’s Basecamp Research has raised an oversubscribed $140M Series C led by S32, with Nvidia, Anthropic’s Anthology Fund and the NATO Innovation Fund among the backers, to design new medicines with AI trained on biology nobody else has.

Fundraising is brutal for European biotech right now – and yet the largest rounds keep finding their way to London. Below, I lay out the round, the company behind it, the market it is compounding into, and what this syndicate tells us about where bio-AI capital is heading.

A $140M cheque from a rare mix of backers

Basecamp Research announced the round on 23 September 2026. S32, the Palo Alto firm founded by Bill Maris, who previously set up Google Ventures, led the oversubscribed Series C. Participation came from Anthropic’s Anthology Fund, Catalio Capital Management, European Tech Collective, Firebrand River Capital, Inception Fund, King Philanthropies, NATO Innovation Fund, Nvidia, PostScriptum, Redalpine, The Rockefeller Foundation, Singular, Sovereign AI and True Ventures, per the company’s announcement.

The round takes total funding to $225M since the company was founded in 2019 (Tech.eu, 23 Sep 2026). Singular led the $60M Series B in October 2024 and returns here, alongside Redalpine, King Philanthropies and Firebrand River Capital.

The money goes to training the next generation of the company’s EDEN models, advancing its pipeline of AI-designed therapeutics toward clinical development, and expanding pharmaceutical partnerships. Basecamp has appointed Richard Pearce, formerly of Biogen, as Chief Business Officer to drive that last part.

Thirty countries of biology behind one model

Founded in London by Dr Glen Gowers and Dr Oliver Vince, Basecamp Research built its position on data before models. Its Atlas draws on biological data collected through access and benefit-sharing partnerships in more than 30 countries across all seven continents – agreements that pay the source countries back, and that took years of unglamorous legal work to assemble.

EDEN, the family of biological foundation models trained on that data, recognises patterns across a huge breadth of previously unseen biology and can generate potential therapeutic candidates directly from information about a disease, the company says. The lead focus is in-vivo cell therapy: reprogramming a patient’s cells inside the body to treat cancer and autoimmune disease, with the stated aim of making cell therapies more sophisticated, customisable and affordable.

“The future of medicine lies in reprogramming the body to repair itself. We design the models and the medicines to teach it how,” said Gowers in the announcement.

An AI drug discovery market compounding at 28% a year

The market Basecamp sells into is one of the steepest curves in health tech: AI in drug discovery is worth USD 5.09bn in 2026 and is projected to reach USD 17.56bn by 2031, a 28.1% CAGR (MarketsandMarkets, Jul 2026).

For scale against our own records: Paris’s Biolevate raised a €30M Series A for life sciences AI last week, and OutPost Bio’s €2.9M pre-seed in March set out to make human microbiology computable. At $140M, Basecamp’s single round is more than four times the larger of those two. European bio-AI has quietly grown a growth stage.

What this syndicate says about Europe’s bio-AI position

So who actually wrote the cheques? The lead is Californian, and Nvidia and Anthropic’s fund give the round its headline glow – the familiar story of European science scaled with American capital. But look at the rest of the table: the NATO Innovation Fund, a Sovereign AI vehicle, European Tech Collective, Zurich’s Redalpine, The Rockefeller Foundation and King Philanthropies. We are watching biological foundation models get treated as strategic infrastructure, in the same week Lisbon’s Tekever closed a $580M Series D for defence drones.

The good news is that Basecamp’s moat is European-made. Benefit-sharing agreements across 30-plus countries are slow, compliance-heavy work – precisely the kind of thing a scraper cannot copy and a fast follower cannot shortcut. The constraint became the asset.

What to watch now: whether the next generation of EDEN trains on European compute, and whether the pharma partnerships Pearce was hired to sign convert into clinical-stage assets rather than pilots. Every European round lands on our fundraising data desk as it breaks. The pattern is clear – keep watching London.