The round was led by venture firm S32, with participation from Anthropic’s Anthology Fund, Nvidia’s NVentures, and a slate of other investors that includes Catalio, Firebrand River Capital, The Rockefeller Foundation and the NATO Innovation Fund. As part of the deal, Andy Conrad, a general partner at S32 and former CEO of Google’s Verily, will join Basecamp’s board of directors.
Basecamp, a frontier‑AI startup focused on therapeutic design, uses its proprietary EDEN (environmentally‑derived evolutionary network) model – which the company says is trained on the world’s largest and most diverse evolutionary dataset – to generate long, complex DNA sequences that can be inserted precisely into a patient’s genome using large serine recombinases.
According to the company, EDEN‑designed therapies aim to overcome the high manufacturing costs and limited complexity of current cell‑therapy platforms, offering a route to more sophisticated, customizable and easier‑to‑administer treatments for diseases such as cancer and autoimmune conditions.
In preclinical work detailed in a January 12 bioRxiv preprint co‑authored with researchers from Nvidia, Microsoft and two academic institutions, EDEN achieved a functional hit rate of 63.2 % across diverse DNA prompts, with half of the generated large serine recombinases (LSRs) showing activity in human cells and delivering therapeutically relevant levels of chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) insertion in primary T cells. The same study reported a synthetic microbiome generated by EDEN that covered 9,067 species with 99 % taxonomic accuracy.
Basecamp’s data engine, the Trillion Gene Atlas, aggregates biological information collected through access‑and‑benefit‑sharing partnerships in more than 30 countries across all continents. Partners in building the Atlas include Nvidia, Anthropic, Pacific Biosciences, and Ultima Genomics, and the dataset underpins the training of EDEN models for designing cell and gene therapies, enzymes and peptides.
The new capital will also fund the hiring of additional scientific and business talent, including the recent appointment of Richard Pearce – formerly Biogen’s head of business development, strategy and portfolio management – as chief business officer to expand partnerships with biopharma companies.
Basecamp’s co‑founder and CEO Glen Gowers said the financing brings the technology “closer to those who need it most,” adding that the company believes the future of medicine lies in reprogramming the body to repair itself. Senior industry leaders such as André Hoffmann, vice‑chairman of Roche and World Economic Forum co‑chair, have also backed the company, describing AI‑designed therapeutics as the next transformation of the biotechnology revolution.