Alphabet spinoff Isomorphic Labs reportedly raising funding at up to $50B valuation

Isomorphic Labs, the Alphabet spinoff focused on speeding up drug discovery, is reportedly in talks for a new funding round. Bloomberg said the size of the round hasn’t been disclosed, but its sources put the company’s target valuation somewhere between $40 billion and $50 billion.

That’s a hefty number for a company whose main pitch is software, not pills. Its flagship system, IsoDDE, is built to cut down the manual work behind therapy development. One of its biggest jobs is finding binding pockets, the specific spots on cell surfaces where drugs can latch on and do their work.

That problem is harder than it sounds. Cell surfaces are complex, they need specialized microscopes to map, and they keep changing. Sometimes the pockets themselves change or vanish. Isomorphic said in February that IsoDDE was more than 50% better at finding binding pockets than the nearest rival tool.

The system also models protein-ligand complexes, the structures formed when a drug binds to a cell. Google DeepMind’s AlphaFold can do that too, but Isomorphic says IsoDDE is about twice as accurate. The company also claims its tool models antibody interactions about 2.3 times better than AlphaFold, which matters because antibodies target the same binding pockets and are notoriously tricky to simulate.

Isomorphic makes money through research partnerships with drugmakers. In 2024 it signed deals worth nearly $3 billion with Eli Lilly and Novartis, and in January it added Johnson & Johnson to the list. All three collaborations focus on small molecules. The fundraising talks are still early, and Bloomberg’s sources did not name the investors involved. Isomorphic’s last raise was a $2.1 billion round announced in March, backed by Alphabet, two of its venture funds and outside investors.