DeepMind spinout Isomorphic Labs has poached a significant chunk of its headcount from rivals Exscientia and BenevolentAI, after they struggled to retain a foothold in a challenging drug discovery market.
Isomorphic Labs, which spun out from Google DeepMind in 2021, announced on Monday it had raised $600m in one of Europe’s largest ever AI rounds, led by OpenAI and Stripe-backer Thrive Capital.
Both Exscientia and BenevolentAI were once heralded as stars of the UK tech scene, raising hundreds of millions of euros each — before ill-fated IPOs saw share prices tumble and the companies slash their workforces.
Since the start of 2023, Isomorphic Labs has hired 12 researchers and engineers from BenevolentAI and seven from Exscientia, according to workforce data compiled by Live Data Technologies.
Bolstered by majority shareholder Alphabet, Isomorphic Labs is aiming to avoid the fate of its former rivals, promising to halve the time it takes to find new medicines.
The company has built on DeepMind’s breakthrough AlphaFold technology — which predicts how protein structures might interact with other molecules — to apply it to a wider range of biological molecules.
Founder and CEO Demis Hassabis, who’s also chief of Google DeepMind, said the company hoped to have its first AI-designed drug in clinical trials by the end of 2025, in an interview with the Financial Times in January.
To get there, Isomorphic Labs will be relying on the skills of a score of engineers who cut their teeth at two former darlings of the UK AI scene. The company has been approached for comment.
A ‘category-defining’ company
Exscientia secured a number of Big Pharma partnerships in its early years with the likes of GSK and Sanofi, and raised more than $600m before IPO’ing in 2021. The company laid off a quarter of staff in 2024 before getting acquired by Recursion Pharma for $688m later that year.
BenevolentAI picked up more than $300m before listing — via a SPAC — in 2021, before its share price fell off a cliff. The failure of a drug candidate in the clinical trial phase in 2023 saw it move to let go of staff across several rounds of lay offs and axe other drug development programmes over the past few years.
Both companies employed hundreds of workers at their peaks.
Isomorphic Labs is working with pharmaceutical giants Eli Lilly and Novartis — which are keen to leverage the company’s tech to cut costs — to develop drug candidates. Together those partnerships brought in more than $80m in 2024, and could be worth up to $3bn excluding royalties for any developed drugs, according to the company.
The startup is also developing its own drug candidates internally, focused in oncology and immunology.
Isomorphic Labs, headquartered in London with an office in Lausanne, Switzerland, could be “category defining”, said Josh Kushner, founder and chief executive of Thrive Capital.
“We believe Isomorphic has earned a rare position to define a new age of drug discovery and design, and we are deeply inspired by their mission and the extraordinary progress they have made to date.”
Together with Google DeepMind, the startup developed and released AlphaFold 3 in May 2024 — an AI model that can predict the structure and interactions of all of life’s molecules with unprecedented accuracy, the companies claim.
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/isomorphic-labs-poaches-talent-ai-startups/
