Isomorphic Labs Wants $40 Billion Before Its First Patient

Isomorphic Labs, the drug-discovery company Alphabet spun out of Google DeepMind, is in early talks to raise new money at a valuation of at least $40 billion, Bloomberg reported on October 8, citing people familiar with the matter. One of those people told Bloomberg the round could value the company at as much as $50 billion. The financing has not closed and the terms could change.

The number arrives five months after Isomorphic closed a $2.1 billion Series B. It also arrives before the company has publicly dosed a single patient with a drug its models designed. That gap is the whole story. Investors are being asked to price an AI drug-design engine on the strength of its science, its backers and its pharma contracts, not on clinical results.

How fast the price moved

Isomorphic's outside fundraising history is short. According to the company, its first external round came on March 31, 2025: $600 million led by Thrive Capital, with GV participating and follow-on capital from Alphabet. Then, on May 12, 2026, it announced the $2.1 billion Series B. Thrive led again, Alphabet and GV returned, and MGX, Temasek, CapitalG and the UK Sovereign AI Fund came in as new investors.

Neither round came with a disclosed valuation. Bloomberg reported at the time of the Series B that Demis Hassabis, Isomorphic's chief executive and DeepMind's co-founder, said Alphabet provided a "large part" of the financing but declined to discuss Alphabet's stake or the company's value. That silence makes the new figure the first public anchor for what Isomorphic is worth, and it is a large one: the two disclosed rounds total $2.7 billion, and the talks would put the company at many multiples of that.

Bloomberg's report did not name the investors in the new talks or say how much Isomorphic aims to raise.

What the money is buying

Isomorphic's pitch rests on AlphaFold, the DeepMind protein-structure system that earned Hassabis and John Jumper a share of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. The company has built a drug-design platform it calls IsoDDE, short for Isomorphic Drug Design Engine, and says it works across multiple therapeutic areas and drug modalities. Its May announcement said the Series B would power that engine, expand the company globally and push its candidates toward the clinic. The company has sites in London, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Lausanne, Switzerland.

The commercial proof so far is partnerships. Isomorphic signed research deals with Eli Lilly and Novartis in early 2024, which together carry nearly $3 billion in potential upfront and milestone payments, excluding royalties, according to the company's figures as reported at the time. Johnson & Johnson has since joined as a partner. Bloomberg notes the company has said it will focus on cancer and immune disorders.

Milestone money is contingent money. Those payments arrive only if partnered programs clear development stages, and most drug candidates in the industry do not. The headline totals measure how much pharma is willing to bet on Isomorphic's engine, not how much it has already paid.

No patients yet

Hassabis had earlier targeted getting compounds into trials by the end of 2025, according to Startup Fortune. That did not happen. Startup Fortune and Crypto Briefing both report that Isomorphic now plans to begin first-in-human trials by the end of 2026, and that it has not yet released clinical data. In a September 29 post, the company described its work as building models, generating data and preparing potential medicines for the clinic, according to Runtime Wire's review of the post.

That makes a $40 billion valuation unusual by biotech standards. Clinical-stage drug developers are typically valued on the probability that specific molecules reach market. Isomorphic is being priced more like an AI platform company, where the asset is the engine that produces the molecules rather than any one of them.

There is a reasonable case for that framing. If AlphaFold-style models can cut years and failure rates out of early discovery, the value accrues to whoever owns the best engine, and Alphabet's balance sheet and DeepMind's research bench are hard advantages to replicate. There is also a reasonable case against it: computing a promising molecule and proving a safe, effective medicine are different problems, and the second one is where most drug programs die.

Why now

The talks fit a pattern visible across AI this year, where private valuations have reset upward between rounds measured in months rather than years. Isomorphic's own jump, from a $2.1 billion raise in May to talks at $40 billion or more in October, is a clean example of that compression.

Alphabet has its own reasons to want an outside mark. Crypto Briefing reports that Alphabet remains Isomorphic's majority owner, and Hassabis, per Bloomberg, also serves as DeepMind's chairman. A high third-party valuation lets Alphabet show the value of a holding that does not yet produce revenue, and gives Isomorphic currency to hire against the frontier labs competing for the same researchers.

What to watch

The first signal is whether the round closes near the $40 billion floor or closer to $50 billion, and who leads it. A return by Thrive would read as insider conviction. A new lead from the public-markets side would read as preparation for something larger.

The second, and more important, signal is the clinic. If Isomorphic doses its first patients on the timeline it has described, the valuation will have a data point to stand on. If that date slips again, the gap between price and proof will widen, and the rest of AI drug discovery, which is being funded partly on Isomorphic's example, will feel it.