AI drug discovery startup Basecamp Research raises $140M

Basecamp Research has landed $140 million in new funding, with S32 leading the Series C round. The investor list is broad and pretty notable: it includes NATO, Nvidia and the Anthology Fund, the $100 million joint venture backed by Anthropic and Menlo Ventures. More than a dozen investors joined in.

The company’s pitch is built around EDEN, a foundation model tuned for medical research. Basecamp says the model has 28 billion parameters, and that it was trained on the Trillion Gene Atlas, a dataset it developed with Anthropic, Nvidia and other partners. That dataset holds information on more than 100 billion genes. This is not a general-purpose chatbot with a lab coat on; it’s meant for a narrower, messier job.

That job starts with in-vivo cell therapies. Basecamp wants EDEN to help researchers design medicines that change a patient’s own cells, often by inserting custom DNA into affected cells. The biology gets ugly fast. DNA is tightly packed into coils inside cells, and researchers have to figure out both the right sequence to build and the right way to get it inside.

Basecamp says its software helps with that delivery problem by using large serine recombinases, which are DNA delivery mechanisms derived from bacteriophages. It also says EDEN can help predict immune responses to new therapies and even help design entire cells that carry therapeutic cargo. CEO Glen Gowers framed the company’s bet bluntly: reprogram the body so it can repair itself.

The fresh cash will go toward speeding up drug development and signing more partnerships with pharmaceutical companies. That part matters just as much as the model itself. In this business, a clever system is nice; a path to market is the real prize.