Basecamp Research raises $140M for AI models on microbial genomes

basecamp research, founded in 2020, has raised $140 million to further develop its biological ai models, called eden. the company trains these models on genetic material from rainforests, oceans, and hot springs to design antibiotics and tools for cell therapies. investor s32 led the round, with participation from nvidia, anthropic's anthology fund, the nato innovation fund, and redalpine. basecamp plans to use the funds to advance its therapy candidates toward clinical development, focusing on cell therapies that genetically modify a patient's cells to fight diseases like cancer. the company's approach involves collecting genetic data from understudied microorganisms, which it believes will help its models learn patterns that can be used for medical purposes. according to cto phil lorenz, biology is a far more complex problem for ai than language, requiring orders of magnitude more data. the company estimates that the number of nucleotides on earth is 10 to the power of 37, a vastly larger dataset than what is available for language models.