Basecamp Research draws $60M to build a 'GPT for biology'

While companies like OpenAI and Anthropic continue to popularize the idea of using ordinary language to ask artificial intelligence agents for answers to their questions, write their proposals or draw pictures, a London startup called Basecamp Research has raised $60 million to tackle a new frontier. It's building an AI agent that not only answers any question related to biology and the biodiversity of the natural world, but produce new insights that humans could not achieve on their own.

"There is an enormous data gap that exists today where people are training [biology] models," said Glen Gower, the CEO of Basecamp Research, in an interview. "Some of the top pharma companies the world are training models that simply don't see enough of the natural world."

The funding comes on the heels of notable momentum for the startup. To date, Gower said, Basecamp Research has inked more than 100 partnerships with organizations across 25 countries to expand its database with primary-source information. About 15 of those are using its AI to help build new products — Procter & Gamble, to pick an early example, is working on formulations for new fabric dyes that are more sustainable.

Notably, Basecamp Research claims that its foundational model, BaseFold, outperforms AlphaFold 2 — whose creators at DeepMind just today won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry — when it comes to accurately predicting large, complex protein structures and small molecule interactions.