Analysis
Basecamp Research, a London- and Boston-based AI drug-discovery company, announced a $140 million Series C on Tuesday led by S32, the fund affiliated with Google co-founder Bill Maris, with participation from NATO's Innovation Fund, Nvidia, Catalio Capital Management, the Rockefeller Foundation, True Ventures and Menlo Ventures' Anthology Fund, according to the company's PR Newswire announcement.
What Basecamp Actually Builds
The company's core asset is the Trillion Gene Atlas, which it describes as the world's largest proprietary biological AI training dataset, built in partnership with Nvidia, Anthropic, PacBio and Ultima Genomics using benefit-sharing data-collection partnerships across more than 30 countries on all seven continents. Basecamp trains its EDEN foundation models on that dataset and is using the new capital to push a pipeline of AI-designed in vivo cell therapies -- reprogramming a patient's own cells inside the body rather than manufacturing engineered cells externally -- toward clinical development.
“The capital comes from S32, Nvidia, Menlo Ventures' Anthology Fund and the other participants.”
The Competitive And Capital Backdrop
In vivo cell reprogramming puts Basecamp in a different lane than ex vivo CAR-T players like Kite and Novartis's cell-therapy units, competing instead with a smaller field of in vivo gene- and cell-editing companies still mostly in preclinical or early trial stages. Anthropic's role is as a technology partner rather than an investor: it helped build the Trillion Gene Atlas and collaborated with Basecamp on Claude Science, according to the company. The capital comes from S32, Nvidia, Menlo Ventures' Anthology Fund and the other participants.
The round arrives the same week Boulder-based Enveda Biosciences raised $311 million on a related natural-compound drug-discovery thesis, and hours before Anthropic itself announced its life-sciences lab's first research result -- together suggesting the AI-for-biology category is attracting real capital velocity, not just isolated bets.
None of this guarantees a drug. Basecamp has not disclosed how far along its lead in vivo programs are in preclinical testing, in vivo cell reprogramming as a modality has a thinner regulatory and manufacturing track record than CAR-T, and 'AI-designed' therapeutics still have to clear the same FDA safety and efficacy bar as any other drug candidate -- a bar that has been unforgiving to hyped computational-biology platforms before.
For GPs evaluating the wave of AI-bio rounds this month, the diligence line worth drawing is between platforms with proprietary data moats -- like Basecamp's cross-continental genomic atlas -- and those simply layering a foundation model on top of public datasets everyone else can access too.
Correction (September 25, 2026): An earlier version of this story, based on the company's original announcement, said Anthropic invested in the round through its Anthology Fund. The Anthology Fund is Menlo Ventures' fund, and Anthropic is a technology partner of Basecamp, not an investor. Basecamp has corrected its release; the headline and story have been updated.