Isomorphic Labs: AI drug design company

Business milestones

• Jan 2024: AI drug discovery partnerships with Novartis and Eli Lilly
• Apr 2025: $600 million funding round led by Thrive Capital
• 2026 (expected): first AI-designed drugs enter clinical trials, according to Hassabis at Davos

Connection to mediKanren

Matt Might's MediKanren (a knowledge graph plus logical reasoning, used to repurpose existing drugs) is the manual forerunner of what Isomorphic Labs is doing at AI scale. The key difference is that Isomorphic designs new compounds from scratch at the molecular level rather than searching existing drug libraries.

Core technology

Drug design engine

Capability

Predicts small-molecule binding affinity faster, more cheaply and more accurately than traditional physics-based simulation

Performance

2x the performance of AlphaFold 3

Released

Feb 2026

Foundation

AlphaFold (protein structure prediction), extended downstream into drug design

Novel capability

Finds new binding pockets on proteins from the amino acid sequence alone, opening the way to entirely new drug targets

Founded

2021

Founder

Demis Hassabis (creator of AlphaFold and Nobel Prize co-winner)

Hassabis roadmap

Step 1

Solve the chemistry problem: compound design, toxicity screening and prediction of safety properties. Timeline: 5-10 years to complete the Drug Design Engine.

Step 2

Persuade regulators to accept AI predictions. Building regulatory trust will take about 10 or more AI-designed drugs going through the full pipeline. Possible future: skipping animal trials and speeding up dose trials.

Investment note

Private company, so not directly investable. Alphabet (GOOGL) is the parent and Isomorphic is a wholly owned subsidiary. Thrive Capital (Josh Kushner) is a major investor.

Parent

Alphabet (spun out of Google DeepMind)

Pipeline

Projects

19

Therapeutic areas

• oncology
• cardiovascular
• immunology

Vision quote

I want to literally cure cancer. I know people say that's the cliché, but what we're building at Isomorphic is general purpose.