Basecamp Research raises $140m for DNA-trained AI models

Basecamp Research, a London-based start-up that trains artificial intelligence on DNA rather than language, has raised $140m from investors including Anthropic, Nvidia and the UK’s sovereign AI fund.

The company said the money will pay for data collectors to travel from Chile to the high Arctic in search of the planet’s rarest genetic code, which will be used to train a new generation of its Eden AI models.

Basecamp did not disclose its valuation, but said it was “very close” to $1bn.

The Eden models run on top of the “Trillion Gene Atlas”, which Basecamp claims is the world’s largest proprietary biological AI training dataset.

Glen Gowers, co-founder and chief executive, said the shortage of biological data to train AI was an industry-wide problem that could limit the speed of advances in AI-designed treatments.

“The problem with biology is you don’t have internet-scale data available,” he said. “What we’re bringing to the table as an AI company is the missing data layer.”

Others in the sector have pointed to the same gap: AI drug-design start-up deepmirror recently secured a £1m Sovereign AI grant to expand its molecular dataset for the same reason.

Basecamp was founded in 2019 by Gowers and Oli Vince, who met at the University of Oxford. On an expedition to Iceland, the pair became the first to sequence DNA completely off-grid. The company has since conducted about 150 expeditions around the world.

“It’s shovels and soil,” Gowers said. “We go to the far-flung corners of the planet, the tops of ice caps, the bottom of the ocean, volcanoes and islands.”

Alongside deepening existing partnerships in countries including Cameroon, Malawi and Chile, the company said the investment will allow it to conduct research in Oceania and the high Arctic.

By training AI on the data it collects, Basecamp aims to develop new medicines and design treatments faster than traditional methods allow. In the immediate future it will focus on cell therapies, an approach in which a patient’s cells are effectively reprogrammed.

“We believe the future of medicine lies in reprogramming the body to repair itself,” Gowers said.

The company said its models allow it to design long and complex DNA sequences faster, cheaper and more accurately than existing cell therapies. The funding will also be used to advance a pipeline of AI-designed therapeutics. Two therapies from its Boston laboratory are already showing promising results in mice, according to the company.

Basecamp has offices in Clerkenwell, London, and in Boston.

The state-backed sovereign AI fund’s participation makes Basecamp the sixth company it has invested in directly. The £500m Sovereign AI fund typically makes equity investments of between £1m and £10m.

The government launched the Sovereign AI programme in April, with drug discovery among the sectors covered by its first round of backing. Venture capitalist Suzanne Ashman was later appointed managing partner of the £500m fund.

Lord Vallance of Balham, the chairman of the government’s AI taskforce, said: “AI will be a powerful tool for turning scientific discovery into better care for patients, faster than ever before.

“By accelerating the design of advanced therapies and making them simpler to deliver, innovations like these could bring transformative treatments to many more patients in need.”

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Amy Ingham

Amy Ingham is a reporter at Business Matters, covering UK business news with a focus on breaking news, business policy, late payments and insolvency. She joined the magazine in 2026 after completing the NCTJ Diploma in Journalism at Harlow College’s journalism school. Her recent reporting includes British Steel’s nationalisation and its impact on SME suppliers, the decline in late payments by large firms, and Insolvency Service director disqualifications. Reach her at aingham@cbmeg.co.uk.