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Isomorphic Labs, the AI drug discovery company spun out of Google DeepMind in 2021, is in advanced discussions to raise more than $2 billion in a new funding round. Thrive Capital — which led the company’s first round and is also a major backer of OpenAI — is set to lead. Alphabet is participating. The round has not yet closed.

The company is led by Demis Hassabis, who also runs Google DeepMind. Hassabis and colleague John Jumper jointly won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for AlphaFold 2, the protein structure prediction model that effectively solved a 50-year grand challenge in biology.

What the Money Is For

The primary target is IsoDDE — the Isomorphic Labs Drug Design Engine. The system is designed to automate manual research workflows across the early stages of drug development: identifying binding pockets, evaluating small molecule interactions, and shortlisting candidate compounds.

On Isomorphic’s internal benchmark, Runs N’ Poses, IsoDDE more than doubled AlphaFold 3’s score across the most difficult binding-pocket tasks. The model also requires less input data about a protein than AlphaFold 3 to begin a useful search, reducing the preparatory work in pharmaceutical projects.

Isomorphic plans to use new capital to enhance IsoDDE and expand its international presence beyond its London headquarters.

Pharma Coverage

The company already holds commercial partnerships with Johnson & Johnson, Eli Lilly, and Novartis — three of the largest pharmaceutical firms in the world. Those partnerships, alongside the IsoDDE benchmarks, form the revenue case for the round.

The Alphabet Pattern

Alphabet has a consistent playbook for its research spinoffs: let them grow to commercial proof points, then fund them into standalone businesses. Waymo raised $16 billion at a $126 billion valuation earlier in 2026. Isomorphic appears to be next in that sequence.

The Isomorphic raise also arrives weeks after OpenAI launched GPT-Rosalind, a restricted domain-specific model for drug discovery that posted 0.751 on BixBench. The two approaches differ: GPT-Rosalind is a general model fine-tuned for pharma tasks; IsoDDE is a purpose-built design engine. The race to own computational drug discovery infrastructure is now a two-lab contest.

Numbers

• Round size: $2B+ (advanced discussions, not closed)
• Lead investor: Thrive Capital
• Alphabet role: Participating investor
• IsoDDE vs AlphaFold 3: 2x+ on Runs N’ Poses hardest tasks
• Pharma partners: J&J, Eli Lilly, Novartis
• Waymo comp: $16B at $126B (Alphabet spinoff benchmark)