Basecamp Research said today it has completed an oversubscribed $140 million Series C financing whose proceeds are intended to fund the training of next generation EDEN models and apply them toward developing improved in vivo cell therapies for a variety of diseases.
Basecamp, a frontier AI company focused on therapeutic design, focuses on leveraging EDEN (short for “environmentally-derived evolutionary network), its biological foundation model, to develop in vivo cell therapies designed to reprogram a patient’s cells inside the body.
EDEN is Basecamp’s new class of foundation models trained on what the company says is the world’s largest and most diverse evolutionary dataset. According to Basecamp, EDEN offers the ability to design long and complex DNA sequences with large serine recombinases capable of delivering those sequences precisely.
EDEN-designed cell therapies are also designed to overcome the high manufacturing cost and limited complexity of present-day cell therapies. As a result, Basecamp said in its announcement, its EDEN-designed therapeutics offer the potential to treat complex diseases that include cancer and autoimmune disease, aiming “to underpin the future of cell therapies, making them more sophisticated, more customizable and simpler to administer” than current cell therapies.
“We believe the future of medicine lies in reprogramming the body to repair itself. We design the models and the medicines to teach it how,” Glen Gowers, PhD, Basecamp’s co-founder and CEO, said in the statement. Gowers co-founded Basecamp with Oliver Vince, PhD.
Basecamp says it has shown strong preclinical results across multiple modalities and disease areas. Aiming to expand its partnerships with biopharmas, Basecamp in April appointed Richard Pearce as chief business officer. Pearce previously served as Biogen’s head of business development, strategy, and portfolio management.
“AI-based approaches promise to change what’s possible for patients who currently have few alternatives. This funding brings this technology closer to those who need it most,” Gowers added.
Big-name investors
One big-name investor participating in the financing is Anthropic—the AI model builder behind the Claude family of large language models. Anthropic invested in Basecamp through its Anthology Fund, a $100 million fund launched in 2024 and financed by Silicon Valley-based VC firm Menlo Ventures. Startups financed by the Anthology Fund receive access to Anthropic products and research, $25,000 in free credits towards Anthropic’s most advanced models, and what the company calls “best-in-class” venture support from Menlo.
“We’re particularly interested in ventures that leverage AI to enhance human capabilities and productivity in fields such as healthcare, legal services, education, energy, infrastructure, and scientific research,” Daniela Amodei, Anthropic’s co-founder and president, stated in announcing the launch of the Anthology Fund.
Anthropic’s offerings include Claude Science, the AI research workbench launched in June and featuring Basecamp’s antibiotic design and vaccine prediction AI models.
Another name investor is NVentures, the venture capital arm of Nvidia—the Silicon Valley microprocessing giant with which Basecamp has leveraged AI to unlock programmable gene insertion, which places large therapeutic DNA sequences at precise locations in the human genome.
Researchers from Nvidia joined partners from Basecamp, Microsoft, and two research institutions in detailing EDEN in a preprint posted January 12 on bioRxiv.
63% hit rate
The investigators showed EDEN to achieve an overall functional hit rate of 63.2% across diverse DNA prompts when prompted on only 30bp of DNA from outside the training data. Half (50%) of EDEN-generated LSRs were active in human cells, achieving therapeutically relevant levels of chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) insertion in primary human T cells. Also, an EDEN-generated synthetic microbiome was shown in the preprint to cover 9,067 species with a biome-specific taxonomic accuracy of 99%.
Nvidia and Anthropic were among partners of Basecamp that built its Trillion Gene Atlas, which draws on biological data collected through access and benefit-sharing partnerships in more than 30 countries across all seven continents. The Atlas is at the center of Basecamp’s AI platform, and according to the company is the world’s largest proprietary biological AI training dataset. Pacific Biosciences of California (PacBio) and Ultima Genomics also partnered in building the Atlas.
Trained on data from the Atlas, Basecamp’s EDEN models deliver a universal understanding of how DNA works across all of life. Its capabilities include designing cell and gene therapies, enzymes and peptides.
Unlike AI systems developed for a single scientific task, EDEN models are trained to recognize patterns across biology. As a result, it can generate potential therapeutic candidates directly from information about a disease, an approach already demonstrated through Basecamp’s collaboration with Anthropic on Claude Science.
Anthropic and NVentures are among participants in the financing, along with Catalio, European Tech Collective, Firebrand River Capital, King Philanthropies, NATO Innovation Fund, Redalpine, The Rockefeller Foundation, Singular, Sovereign AI, and True Ventures.
‘Next transformation’
Basecamp has garnered additional investment from senior leaders across biopharma and global industry, including André Hoffmann, vice chairman of Roche, a board member of Roche subsidiary Genentech, and co-chair of the World Economic Forum.
“The biotechnology revolution that began fifty years ago transformed how we make medicines. Personalized, AI-designed therapeutics represent the next transformation of that journey,” Hoffmann stated. “Basecamp Research has built the full platform to deliver it, from biological data to trained models to designed therapies. This will be key in helping the industry to continue to innovate.”
Basecamp raised $60 million in Series B financing in 2024, and a $20 million Series A round two years earlier.
The Series C financing was led by S32, a Palo Alto, CA-based venture firm. S32 has about $3.5 billion in assets under management after closing earlier this year on a $517 million sixth flagship fund, according to PitchBook.
As a result of the latest financing, Andy Conrad, General Partner at S32 and former CEO of Google’s Verily, will join Basecamp’s board.
“AI is opening up new possibilities across every part of society, but perhaps nowhere is the potential more meaningful than in human health. The ability to combine AI, biological data and scientific insight could transform how we understand disease, discover medicines and ultimately improve and extend people’s lives,” Conrad stated. “Basecamp Research is building an important technology platform at the center of that opportunity.”
