Inside Basecamp Research, the AI startup turning evolution into training data

Basecamp Research has raised $140 million from investors including Nvidia and Anthropic’s Anthology Fund. The London company trains AI models on genetic material from rainforests, oceans, and hot springs to design antibiotics and tools for cell therapies.

In an interview with THE DECODER, CTO Phil Lorenz explains why biology is a far bigger problem for AI than language, and why good scores on paper don’t guarantee good molecules. According to the company, investor S32 led the round. Nvidia, Anthropic’s Anthology Fund, the NATO Innovation Fund, and Redalpine also took part, among others. Founded in 2020, Basecamp plans to use the money to keep developing its biological AI models, called EDEN, and to push its own therapy candidates toward clinical development. Cell therapies come first. These treatments genetically modify a patient’s cells so they can fight cancer, for example. Basecamp wants to make that change directly inside the body. To get there, the company looks to microorganisms from habitats researchers have barely studied. The models are supposed to learn patterns from their genomes that can be put to medical use. “Given the complexity of biology, we just need orders of magnitude more data,” Phil Lorenz, Basecamp’s CTO, tells THE DECODER. What matters most, he says, is pairing that massive data collection with smaller, targeted experiments. There’s still a lot of development work ahead before any of this becomes a treatment. So far, Basecamp has lab results and data from mice. That doesn’t show whether its approach can produce safe and effective therapies in humans. Why public genome databases can’t carry biological AI The Wall Street Journal recently reported that pharma companies are pouring billions into AI, but solid evidence of noticeably higher success rates in clinical development is still scarce.