Britain just bought into the Nobel winner’s plan to redesign medicine
Key Points
- Britain’s month-old Sovereign AI fund has invested in Isomorphic Labs, the AI drug-discovery company founded by Nobel laureate Demis Hassabis.
- This marks the fund’s third equity deal and backs Isomorphic’s “unified drug design engine” that uses AI to predict and design molecules.
- Isomorphic stands out as the most significant investment yet for Sovereign AI.
- The move is intended to retain frontier AI talent and companies in Britain rather than letting them migrate to US or Gulf funding.
- Science Secretary Liz Kendall and Sovereign AI’s Joséphine Kant highlighted it as a strategic step to build Britain’s next-generation tech leadership.
Britain’s month-old Sovereign AI fund has bought into Isomorphic Labs, the London drug discovery company founded by Nobel laureate Demis Hassabis.
The investment forms part of a wider fundraise announced by Isomorphic, which is using AI to design new medicines from the ground up.
It marks the third equity bet placed by Sovereign AI since the state-backed venture vehicle launched last month, and the ninth company overall to receive some form of backing from it.
Isomorphic is the most consequential name on that list by a stretch. Hassabis won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the work behind AlphaFold, the DeepMind model that cracked the long-standing puzzle of how to accurately predict protein structures.
Isomorphic, which he founded in 2021, is now trying to push that further: not just predicting biology, but designing the molecules that act on it.
The company says it has built a “unified drug design engine” made up of several proprietary AI models, aimed at multiple therapeutic areas and drug types.
The pitch is that AI can compress drug discovery timelines that have historically run into decades, and bring forward treatments for diseases that the conventional pipeline has either failed or ignored.
Sovereign AI is keeping the cheque size to itself, in line with venture capital convention. Typical equity tickets from the fund range between £1 million and £10 million, though it has said the size varies by company. Isomorphic’s announcement of the wider raise is likely to give a clearer picture of where this one lands.
The bigger story is what Sovereign AI is doing in plain sight. The fund is structured to behave like a venture capital firm with the resources of the state behind it, taking equity in early and growth-stage UK AI companies rather than handing out grants.
Science and Technology Secretary Liz Kendall framed the announcement as Britain extending a tradition that runs from penicillin to MRI scanners into the AI era.
Joséphine Kant, Sovereign AI’s Head of Ventures, was less measured. “Isomorphic is one of the most consequential companies being built anywhere in the world today, and it’s being built in Britain,” she said. “Sovereign AI exists to invest in the companies that will shape what this country becomes next.”
The UK already has the third-largest AI market in the world and more AI startups than anywhere else in Europe.
Sovereign AI’s bet is that state capital, deployed at venture speed, keeps the winners from drifting to the US or Gulf money markets that have so far hoovered up much of the upside in frontier AI.
Isomorphic, with Hassabis at the front of it, is exactly the kind of company that test is built around.
