Isomorphic Labs, a London-founded and headquartered company, using AI to design and develop new medicines, has been named as the latest firm to receive investment from the UK Government’s Sovereign AI Fund.

The investment forms part of a fundraise announced by Isomorphic Labs today, as it scales up its work to tackle some of the world’s most serious diseases.

The company, founded by Nobel Prize-winner Sir Demis Hassabis, is reimagining drug discovery, with AI at its core.

Launched just last month, Sovereign AI is the government’s big bet on promising early-stage AI companies to help them grow, scale and succeed from Britain, offering a range of backing to high-potential AI businesses that are starting out here in the UK.

“Isomorphic Labs’ ground-breaking work has the potential to reshape completely how medicines are discovered – cutting years off development and giving real hope to people living with devastating diseases. This is AI at its very best – pushing the boundaries of innovation to improve people’s lives,” science and technology secretary Liz Kendall said.

“Britain has a proud history of world-changing medical breakthroughs – from penicillin to MRI scanners. Now in the AI era, we are backing a brilliant UK firm working on another huge jump forward in science to the benefit of people across the country and around the world.”

Isomorphic’s work builds on the breakthrough success of AlphaFold: the AI model developed by DeepMind that sent shockwaves through the world of science through its ability to accurately predict the structures of proteins –  which are the chemical building blocks of all life on Earth.

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Isomorphic Labs is going beyond AlphaFold, developing a number of proprietary breakthrough AI models that together form its unified drug design engine, across multiple therapeutic areas and drug modalities.

This backing brings the number of startups receiving equity investment from Sovereign AI to three since it launched, and the overall number of startups receiving Sovereign AI backing – including support accessing compute – to nine.