• Funding will advance a pipeline of EDEN-designed therapeutics, starting with in vivo cell therapy, and expand pharmaceutical partnerships
• The company has demonstrated strong preclinical results across multiple modalities and disease areas

The NATO Innovation Found is backing Basecamp Research, a frontier AI company developing AI-designed medicines, as part of a $140M Series C to train a new generation of EDEN models and advance a pipeline of AI-designed therapeutics towards clinical development.

Basecamp’s ambition is to develop cures for diseases that remain incurable by designing medicines that reprogram the body to repair itself. The company combines frontier AI models trained on proprietary biological data with technology for writing DNA sequences into cells.

The oversubscribed round was led by S32, with participation from Anthropic’s Anthology Fund, Catalio Capital Management, European Tech Collective, Firebrand River Capital, Inception Fund, King Philanthropies, NATO Innovation Fund, NVIDIA, PostScriptum, Redalpine, The Rockefeller Foundation, Singular, Sovereign AI and True Ventures.

Applying EDEN to develop new therapies

Basecamp Research is applying EDEN, its biological foundation model, to in vivo cell therapy – reprogramming a patient’s cells inside the body. Today’s cell therapies are limited both in the complexity of what they can deliver and by a manufacturing process that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars per patient.

By pairing EDEN’s ability to design long and complex DNA sequences with large serine recombinases that can precisely integrate them into the genome, Basecamp’s platform aims to underpin the future of cell therapies, making them more sophisticated, more customisable and simpler to administer. This has the potential to transform how we treat cancer, autoimmune disease, and more.

The company has demonstrated strong preclinical results across multiple modalities and disease areas. To expand its pharmaceutical partnerships, Basecamp has appointed Richard Pearce, formerly of Biogen, as Chief Business Officer.

The AI and data powering Basecamp Research’s therapies

At the centre of Basecamp Research’s AI platform is the Trillion Gene Atlas, the world’s largest proprietary biological AI training dataset. Built with partners including NVIDIA, Anthropic, PacBio and Ultima Genomics, the Atlas draws on biological data collected through access and benefit-sharing partnerships in more than 30 countries across all seven continents.

Trained on this data, the company’s EDEN models recognise patterns across a huge breadth of previously unseen biology. Unlike AI systems developed for a single scientific task, EDEN models aim to deliver a universal understanding of how DNA works across all of life.

This means that the models can generate potential therapeutic candidates directly from information about a disease, an approach already demonstrated through Basecamp’s collaboration with Anthropic on Claude Science. The EDEN models’ capabilities include designing cell and gene therapies, enzymes and peptides.

Why Basecamp Research – Addressing the bottleneck to change how biological products are discovered and made

By Sander Verbrugge, Partner and David Ordonez, Senior Associate

Computational biology has always been held back by how deep and how good its data is. Better algorithms can only do so much when the data underneath them is thin or of uneven quality. Basecamp is the only team that has set out to fix this at the source. Instead of building on existing datasets, it tackles the data problem directly, and that lets it build better models on the path to general intelligence for biology.

Models that can “speak the language of life” open up the field’s biggest opportunities. Those range from curing disease to designing new proteins and enzymes for industrial use. A platform like this could change how biological products are discovered and made.

The capabilities are highly relevant to the Alliance, in health, industrial resilience and advanced biomanufacturing. NIF’s investment backs Glen, Oliver and the team to scale the technology and bring it to Alliance governments and industry.

It’s a founding team with a clear, differentiated view of the field’s core bottleneck. It’s attacking that bottleneck at its root, and the upside reaches across defence, security and economic resilience.