Basecamp Research lands $140M from Nvidia to push AI-designed cell therapy toward the clinic

Basecamp Research has pulled in $140 million in a Series C and now sits at an $800 million valuation. The London startup says the money will go into its EDEN models and into cell therapies that are meant to edit DNA inside the body. S32 led the round, which was described as oversubscribed, and Nvidia joined a long list of backers that also includes Anthropic and the NATO Innovation Fund.

The company’s story is the kind of biotech origin tale people either love or roll their eyes at, depending on how much coffee they’ve had. Glen Gowers and Oliver Vince met at Oxford, then later spent a month on Iceland’s Vatnajökull ice cap sequencing DNA in sub-zero conditions. Basecamp was founded in 2019 and is now based in Clerkenwell, London, with another site in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Public hiring data puts the headcount at more than 50.

What Basecamp is building is not just another model that predicts biology from afar. EDEN is trained on what the company calls the Trillion Gene Atlas, a dataset assembled through access and benefit-sharing partnerships in more than 30 countries. The first use case is in vivo cell therapy: long DNA sequences are designed and then paired with serine recombinases, which can insert that DNA directly into a patient’s genome. That skips the extract, modify and reinfuse routine that standard cell therapies rely on.

The scientific pitch is ambitious, but the company is still early. Basecamp says it has strong preclinical results across several disease areas, yet none of its six disclosed programs has entered a clinical trial. The new money follows a $60 million Series B in October 2024 and a $19.8 million Series A in December 2022, taking total funding to just under $220 million. For now, Basecamp is trying to prove that a narrower approach — genomic data plus direct DNA writing — can keep up with rivals raising much larger sums to chase broader molecular prediction.