Isomorphic Labs

What Isomorphic Labs does

Isomorphic Labs is a London-based company that uses artificial intelligence to design new medicines. It was founded in 2021 as a spin-off from Google DeepMind, Alphabet's AI research lab, according to Reuters. Reuters names DeepMind chief Demis Hassabis as Isomorphic's founder and chief executive. Its work builds on AlphaFold, the DeepMind system that predicts the three-dimensional shapes of proteins. Hassabis and DeepMind colleague John Jumper were jointly awarded half of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for protein structure prediction.

The company's core technology is the Isomorphic Labs Drug Design Engine, or IsoDDE. It is a set of AI models the company described in a technical report on February 10, 2026. Isomorphic says the engine:

• predicts how proteins and candidate drugs fit together
• estimates how tightly they bind (binding affinity)
• locates hidden binding sites known as cryptic pockets

The company also has research partnerships with Eli Lilly, Novartis and Johnson & Johnson.

Why it matters

Investors have committed billions of dollars to Isomorphic before any of its drugs has reached human testing. It announced a $2.1 billion Series B round on May 12, 2026, led by Thrive Capital with Alphabet, GV, MGX, Temasek, CapitalG and the UK Sovereign AI Fund. That followed a $600 million round in March 2025, which TechCrunch reported was its first external funding. BioPharma Dive said the Series B was the largest venture financing among the rounds it has tracked since at least 2022.

The partnerships with Eli Lilly and Novartis included upfront payments of $45 million and $37.5 million, TechCrunch reported in January 2024. It also reported potential performance-based milestone payments of up to $1.7 billion and $1.2 billion.

As of late May 2026 the company had no drug in clinical trials. Hassabis declined to give Fortune a timeline.

Recent developments

• January 2026: Max Jaderberg, previously chief AI officer, took over as president on January 1. The company announced the change in November 2025. On January 20 the company announced a multi-target research collaboration with Johnson & Johnson. The same day, Hassabis said in Davos that first clinical trials were expected by the end of 2026. Reuters described that as a delay from an earlier end-of-2025 goal.
• February 2026: Isomorphic published its IsoDDE report. It claimed the system more than doubled the accuracy of AlphaFold 3 on the hardest part of one benchmark. Columbia University computational biologist Mohammed AlQuraishi told Nature it was a major advance. But he said outsiders know nothing of the details. IsoDDE is proprietary, unlike earlier AlphaFold systems.
• May 2026: Reuters reported that the Series B valuation was undisclosed. It said the company still expected first trials by the end of 2026.
• September 2026: Chris Butler, who runs drug discovery, told a Semafor forum that preclinical work was on track. He declined to give a trial timeline. On September 29 the company wrote that its design agent ran molecule searches over two to four days. It compared that with one to three months for each step of the traditional process. That account is a company post, not a peer-reviewed study.

What to watch

• Whether a first human trial starts by the end of 2026, the target Hassabis gave in January. The company's September 29 post gave no start date.
• Whether independent groups match IsoDDE's results. Gabriele Corso, a co-developer of the Boltz-2 model, told Nature he sees them as a baseline to match and exceed.
• How the new money is spent. Hassabis told Fortune the near-term priority is more computing power.