Oliver Vince, Co-Founder at Basecamp Research: BREAKING: Basecamp Research raised $140m Series C

Yeah, I mean, Basecamp at a very high level is looking at using AI to understand biology at a massive scale.

And so what we do is we basically build huge genomic data sets.

We build huge language models on those genomic data sets.

And we use them to interesting and important applications.

Obviously, the better and the bigger these models get, the closer and more relevant they become in medicine.

And so we're now sort of starting to see them be very, very useful in the application of ultimately AI for curing disease, which has been a very, very, very exciting journey to go on.

Which is amazing, right? There's a lot of talk about AI, there's a lot of backlash against AI at the moment, but really using AI to cure some of the most dangerous and horrible diseases, and it's a real use case for AI for good.

You've just raised how much and who by.

raised $140 million, which is a great new round of contributions led by S32 over in the US, but contributions from existing investors, new investors all over the world, across tech, across pharma.

One of the, you know, our longest supporters has been Andre Hoffman, who's the vice chairman of Roche to give you the complete other side of the sort of tech pharma split, if you like.

And, yeah, just super proud of all the different people that come around the table and, you know, excited to build with them, basically.

And I guess a lot has changed in the company since your Series B.

You raised, I think it was $60 million led by Singular, I think towards, it was announced at the end of 2024.

Since then, there's been some really exciting announcements.

Can you talk about some of those, maybe like some of the models, the Eden models, the Gene Atlas that you've launched? Can you maybe talk about those two releases and why, I guess, I assume they were so important in unlocking this big Series C?

Yeah.

So, I mean, as I said at the start, right, it's a relatively simple idea.

We're just going to try and teach AI to understand biology.

And then the question is kind of like, what do you do with that? Why? Why do you care? And effectively, we're seeing the same thing happen in these models as happened in the language space, which is that biology is fundamentally a language.

You know, you can learn to speak biology if you like.

And that basically the bigger these models get, the more data they have, the smarter they get, and the more capable they get for useful applications.

So, To run you through some of those, you know, we have been building this database for a long time.

We have these partnerships in sort of 30 countries, more than 200 different locations around the world.

And we have been scaling this data set accordingly.

On that, and then one of the big releases that made our first public partnership with NVIDIA was the Eden models.