Basecamp Research

Basecamp Research is a London-based artificial intelligence and biotechnology company that has assembled what it describes as the world's largest and most diverse database of biological sequences, sampled directly from nature, and uses that proprietary data to train protein design and biological foundation models. Founded in 2019 by Glen Gowers and Oliver Vince, the company collects DNA from extreme and biodiverse environments worldwide under benefit-sharing agreements aligned with the Nagoya Protocol, and argues that the diversity of its data, rather than the size of its models alone, is the decisive advantage for AI in biology. ^[1][2][3] By 2026 it described itself as a company that "trains frontier AI models for therapeutic design" and was using its models to build a wholly owned pipeline of its own medicines, starting with in vivo cell therapy. ^[18][31]

Basecamp's central thesis is that public sequence repositories such as UniProt are too narrow to support frontier generative models: by the company's accounting, roughly 70 percent of existing public sequence data derives from only about ten heavily studied species. Its response has been to build a proprietary biological dataset, branded BaseData and structured as a knowledge graph called BaseGraph, that it says is more than ten times larger than all public databases combined and that catalogues over one million previously unknown species. The company has used this resource to launch a protein structure model (BaseFold) and a family of generative biology models (EDEN), and to enter partnerships including a genetic medicine collaboration with the laboratory of David R. Liu at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. ^[1][3][4][5] In September 2026 it raised a $140 million Series C round led by S32; Reuters reported that the round valued the company at $800 million, a figure that does not appear in the company's own announcement. ^[18][20]

Overview

Basecamp Research operates at the intersection of biodiversity discovery, data infrastructure, and machine learning. Its business model treats curated, contextualized, and ethically sourced biological data as a defensible asset, or "data moat," that can be used both to train the company's own models and to supply data and tools to pharmaceutical, industrial biotechnology, and AI partners. Chief executive Glen Gowers has framed the company's position by contrasting it with conventional AI drug discovery, arguing that "AI is not magic. It's a pattern recognition tool that has creativity, but within the limits of what it's already seen," and that better data, not just larger models, expands those limits. ^[2][6]

The company's emphasis shifted between 2024 and 2026. Its early commercial work designed enzymes and other proteins for industrial and consumer partners, while by September 2026 it was presenting itself mainly as a developer of AI-designed medicines, with six internal therapeutic programs and a stated aim of reaching clinical development. ^{[7][18][31][32]} Reuters noted at the time of the Series C that the company had not given a timeline for starting clinical trials. ^[20]

The company is headquartered in London and has offices and laboratories in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where its therapeutics development team is based. ^[18][28][31] In 2024 the company hired Anupama Hoey, a biopharma executive who had previously held roles at companies including Sutro Biopharma and Second Genome, as chief commercial officer. ^[1][2] The company's leadership page listed the following executives as of October 2026. ^[28]

Founding

Basecamp Research traces its origins to an off-grid DNA sequencing expedition led by Gowers and Vince, who met at the University of Oxford; TechCrunch reported that they met as undergraduates there. ^[9][32] In 2019 the pair ran a fully self-contained, solar-powered sequencing operation on the Vatnajokull icecap in Iceland, sequencing microbial DNA in the field without grid power or internet connectivity. In a paper published in the journal Genes in November 2019, they and four co-authors described hauling a miniaturised sequencing lab across the ice cap by ski and sledge, then, after 11 days of unsupported travel, running more than 24 hours of Nanopore sequencing of a geothermal hot spring gorge on the ice cap's northern edge using solar power alone. ^[34] They found that roughly two-thirds of the samples they brought back had never been recorded before, which convinced them that the planet's microbial diversity was vastly under-sampled and commercially untapped. ^[6] The company was incorporated in 2019 around this insight. ^[1][3][7]

Both founders hold doctorates; NutraIngredients described the pair as having PhDs in synthetic biology and bioengineering. ^[7] According to the company, Gowers studied engineering biology at Oxford and completed his PhD at Imperial College London after early-career experience at GSK, while Vince studied at Oxford and earned a PhD in cancer drug research. ^[28] Gowers serves as chief executive, and the company lists Vince as co-founder. ^[18][28]

The biodiversity database and ethical sourcing

Basecamp's core asset is its proprietary data. The company sends sampling expeditions to biodiverse and extreme environments, including acidic hot springs, Antarctic soils, and even World War II shipwrecks, and sequences the genetic material it recovers. Each data point is tagged with rich environmental and contextual metadata, such as the conditions and location where an organism was found, which the company says is critical for teaching models how proteins behave in their native context. The data is organized as a knowledge graph (BaseGraph) of sequences and the relationships between them. ^[3][8]

By June 2025 the company reported that its BaseData dataset contained 9.8 billion novel protein sequences and that, after removing redundant entries, it was over ten times larger than all public databases combined; it credited this work with the discovery of more than one million new species. ^[3] A company preprint released alongside that announcement stated that, as of late 2024, BaseData held 9.8 billion novel genes and more than one million species not represented in other genomic databases, gathered through a partnership supply chain across 26 countries and autonomous regions that could add up to 2 billion novel genes per month. The same preprint reported that 68 percent of all sequence data in the public Sequence Read Archive comes from just five species. ^[23] In March 2024 the company said BaseGraph contained more than 6 billion relationships. ^[4] The company has consistently positioned this scale against the concentration of public data, noting that the bulk of public sequence information comes from a handful of model organisms. ^[3][23]

A defining feature of Basecamp's approach is that it claims to source 100 percent of its data ethically, under access and benefit-sharing arrangements consistent with the Nagoya Protocol to the Convention on Biological Diversity. Every sample is linked to the consent of the relevant landowner or authority and to an agreement under which the country or community of origin, which the company calls "guardians" or biodiversity partners, receives a share of revenue or royalties when the resulting digital sequence information is used commercially or to train AI models. Basecamp distributed its first wave of royalties in 2024 to 37 communities and organizations across 13 countries, a figure it later reported growing to roughly 60 organizations across 21 countries. ^[10][6] In August 2024, ahead of the COP16 UN biodiversity conference in Cali, Colombia, Basecamp and the government of Cameroon announced a benefit-sharing deal that the company described as the first such digital-sequence-information agreement with a central African nation, pairing royalty payments with scientific training and laboratory funding. ^{[3][8][10][11]} As of October 2026 the company's website claimed more than 200 access and benefit-sharing agreements, royalties paid in 21 countries, and more than 100 scientists trained through its partnerships. ^[30]

The model has also drawn criticism. Writing in Fortune in March 2026, Sharon Goldman, who had moderated a panel presented by Basecamp at SXSW, noted that the Financial Times, in an earlier long article on the company, had reported criticism that sending explorers to places such as Cameroon, Costa Rica and the Arctic risked echoing a modern form of colonialism by extracting value from communities without adequately sharing it. Fortune reported that the company has built systems to tag the origin of each sample and measure its contribution to downstream outputs so that royalties can be distributed accordingly. ^[6]

The table below summarizes self-reported scale figures, which have grown over time and should be read as company claims rather than independently audited statistics.

Trillion Gene Atlas

On March 18, 2026, at SXSW in Austin and NVIDIA's GTC conference in San Jose, Basecamp launched the Trillion Gene Atlas, an initiative to generate and model biological data at the trillion-gene scale. The company said the project aims to expand known evolutionary genetic diversity 100-fold by collecting genomic data from more than 100 million species across thousands of sites, and compared it in scale to the Human Genome Project. Partners named at launch were Anthropic; the sequencing companies Ultima Genomics and PacBio, which are to provide high-throughput short-read and long-read sequencing; and NVIDIA, whose accelerated computing and Parabricks software are to speed up metagenomic assembly. The partners said they expected to compress more than 20 years of processing into less than two years. The company also announced new partnerships in Chile and Argentina and an expanded collaboration in Antarctica, and said its network of scientific collaborators then spanned 31 countries. ^[24] In June 2026, GEN reported that the Atlas aimed to scale BaseData 100-fold over the next two years. ^[25]

AI models (BaseFold and EDEN)

Basecamp has released two notable model lines built on its proprietary data.

In March 2024 the company introduced BaseFold, a protein structure prediction model created by augmenting AlphaFold2 with BaseGraph data. In results posted to bioRxiv and evaluated against CASP15 and CAMEO benchmark proteins, Basecamp reported up to a sixfold improvement in structural accuracy over AlphaFold2 for certain large, complex proteins and up to a threefold improvement in modeling small-molecule (ligand) interactions with protein targets. CTO Phil Lorenz described BaseGraph as "the core driver of our advances in AI." ^[4][12]

The EDEN (environmentally-derived evolutionary network) models are a family of metagenomic foundation models developed in collaboration with NVIDIA. ^[17][21] The largest disclosed member, EDEN-28B, is described as a GPT-4-scale model trained on roughly 9.7 trillion biological (nucleotide) tokens spanning about 10 billion genes drawn from more than one million species. ^[13][21][29] In January 2026, Basecamp announced that it had used the EDEN models to achieve programmable gene insertion, the placement of large therapeutic DNA sequences at precise locations in the genome, going beyond the small edits typical of CRISPR. The company reported designing insertion tools active at over 10,000 disease-relevant genomic sites, demonstrating CAR-T integration with greater than 90 percent tumor-cell clearance in laboratory assays, and a 97 percent (32 of 33) functional success rate for AI-designed antimicrobial peptides against pathogens on the World Health Organization's critical-priority list. The gene-insertion work built in part on technology licensed from Tome Biosciences. Vince characterized the milestone by saying, "You can debate whether it's perfect or not, but it will change how we develop medicine." ^[13][14]

The EDEN preprint was posted to bioRxiv on January 12, 2026 by more than 50 authors, including researchers from NVIDIA and Microsoft. ^[13][17] It describes a model family that uses a Llama 3-style transformer architecture scaled from 100 million to 28 billion parameters, tokenizes DNA at single-nucleotide resolution, and was trained with a context length of 8,192 tokens. ^[21] The largest model was trained with about 1.95 x 10^24 FLOPs on 1,008 GPUs. ^[14][21] The company said the GPUs were NVIDIA Hopper chips and that training used NVIDIA BioNeMo libraries. ^[14] Gowers told Tech.eu that the models cost tens of millions of pounds to produce and that post-training used lab-generated data. ^[27] The preprint reports the following experimental results: ^[21]

GEN noted in January 2026 that the preprint had not yet been peer reviewed. ^[13] The paper compares EDEN's generations with those of the Evo 2 40-billion-parameter genomic model. ^[21] A companion paper on EDEN's machine learning methodology, "Scaling Laws and Architectural Frontiers in Metagenomic Foundation Models," was presented as a poster at ICML 2026. It compared Llama-style transformers, Mamba state-space models and Hyena long-convolution models for nucleotide-level modeling, reported that the Llama architecture scaled more efficiently as capacity grew, and derived "quality-aware" scaling laws for metagenomic data. ^[22]

In January 2026 Tech.eu reported that the models would not be released as a chatbot and would instead be used by the company with pharmaceutical partners to design therapeutics. ^[27] On June 30, 2026, when Anthropic launched Claude Science, Basecamp announced that two EDEN capabilities, antibiotic (antimicrobial peptide) design and prediction of antigen immunogenicity for vaccine work, would be available through the platform. ^[25][26] The company's website describes these as accessible through a connector for Claude, allowing researchers to request designs in natural language. ^[29] Vince told GEN that "potentially any clinician in the world can chat with Claude and design an antibiotic that may work," though GEN noted that generating human-ready antibiotics this way was still a step away. ^[25]

Therapeutic pipeline

Basecamp's pipeline page, dated September 2026, lists three platforms (gene insertion using EDEN-designed large serine recombinases, gene editing, and peptide and protein design) and six wholly owned programs, none yet in clinical trials. ^[31] The company says its in vivo cell therapy approach pairs EDEN-designed DNA sequences with recombinases that integrate them into the genome inside the body, and contrasts this with current cell therapies, which it says are limited in what they can deliver and by a manufacturing process that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars per patient. ^[18]

Partnerships

In October 2024, alongside its Series B financing, Basecamp announced a multi-year genetic medicine collaboration with the laboratory of David R. Liu, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator and core member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard who is known for pioneering base editing and prime editing. The collaboration pairs the Liu Lab's gene editing and wet-lab expertise with Basecamp's proprietary datasets and in-house AI models to invent novel fusion proteins and other large molecules for "programmable" genetic medicines. A rationale cited for the partnership is that gene-editing tools can be mined from the natural "warfare" between bacteria and viruses, a domain that Basecamp's biodiversity sampling is well placed to capture. ^[1][2][6]

In October 2024 Gowers said the company had partnerships with 15 companies working in the biological sciences, three of them large drugmakers. ^[2] TechCrunch reported at the time that Procter & Gamble was using Basecamp's models to design detergent enzymes that clean stains at cold temperatures and that Colorifix was working on more sustainable fabric dyes. ^[32] Its March 2026 Trillion Gene Atlas initiative (described above), a moonshot to expand catalogued genetic diversity roughly 100-fold, was undertaken with Anthropic, sequencing firms Ultima Genomics and PacBio, and NVIDIA's AI infrastructure. The company has also worked with Microsoft and NVIDIA on cloud and accelerated-computing infrastructure for its data pipeline. ^{[6][8][15][24]}

In November 2025 Nebius named Basecamp among the first partners for its NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra deployment in the London area; Vince said that having the infrastructure in the UK meant the company could "keep greater control over our data." ^[35]

Funding

Basecamp Research had raised approximately $85 million in venture capital by October 2024. ^[1][2] The company closed a $20 million Series A round in December 2022, led by Systemiq Capital, with participation from investors including Valo, Blue Horizon, True Ventures and Hummingbird Ventures; the round brought its total funding to $30 million. ^[7][16][33] In October 2024 it announced a $60 million Series B led by the Paris-based firm Singular, with participation from S32, redalpine, and several prominent individual investors, including Roche vice-chairman Andre Hoffmann, Royal Philips chair and former DSM chief executive Feike Sijbesma, and former Unilever chief executive Paul Polman, alongside returning investors True Ventures and Hummingbird Ventures. TechCrunch reported that the company did not disclose a valuation but described the Series B as an up-round. ^[1][2][32]

NVIDIA has separately made a strategic investment in the company to accelerate its AI work. ^[8] In January 2026 Basecamp confirmed an investment from NVentures, NVIDIA's venture capital arm, in a pre-Series C round; the amount was not disclosed. ^[14][27] Tech.eu noted that Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang had named Basecamp in 2025 among the UK startups Nvidia planned to back as part of a £2 billion commitment to the UK AI industry. ^[27]

On September 23, 2026, Basecamp announced an oversubscribed $140 million Series C led by S32, the venture firm founded by Bill Maris, founder of Alphabet's GV. ^[18][19] Participants named by the company were Menlo Ventures' Anthology Fund, Catalio Capital Management, European Tech Collective, Firebrand River Capital, Inception Fund, King Philanthropies, NATO Innovation Fund, NVIDIA, PostScriptum, Redalpine, The Rockefeller Foundation, Singular, Sovereign AI and True Ventures, with additional investment from senior industry figures including Andre Hoffmann. ^[18] The Anthology Fund is a fund that Menlo Ventures runs in partnership with Anthropic; Tech.eu described Anthropic as a new investor joining through that partnership, and Sovereign AI as the UK government's Sovereign AI Fund. ^[17][19] S32 general partner Andy Conrad, a former chief executive of Google's Verily, joined Basecamp's board. ^[17][18] The company said the money would train a new generation of EDEN models and advance a pipeline of AI-designed therapeutics toward clinical development, starting with in vivo cell therapy, and noted that it had appointed former Biogen executive Richard Pearce as chief business officer, an appointment GEN dated to April 2026. ^[17][18][20]

The company's announcement did not state a valuation. Reuters reported that the round valued the company at $800 million and did not say whether that figure was pre-money or post-money. ^[18][20] Tech.eu put the company's total funding at $225 million after the round. ^[19]

Timeline

Significance

Basecamp Research is frequently cited as a leading example of the thesis that proprietary, high-quality biological data is the binding constraint, and therefore the most durable competitive moat, for AI in the life sciences, much as web-scale text is for large language models. Where many computational biology efforts train on the same public repositories, Basecamp's wager is that systematically expanding the diversity and contextual richness of training data unlocks designs, enzymes, proteins, and gene-editing tools, that lie outside what existing models have ever seen. ^[2][6][8]

The company is equally notable for attempting to make large-scale biodiscovery ethical and traceable by design. Its insistence on linking every data point to documented consent and a benefit-sharing agreement is presented as a template for how commercial use of genetic resources can comply with the Nagoya Protocol and emerging digital-sequence-information rules, including those negotiated under the high-seas BBNJ agreement, while still returning value to the countries and communities where the biology originates. Whether Basecamp's self-reported scale claims and model performance translate into clinically and commercially validated products remains to be demonstrated, but its partnerships with the Broad Institute, NVIDIA, and Anthropic have made it one of the more closely watched companies positioning data, rather than model architecture alone, as the frontier of AI for biology. ^[3][8][10]

Debarghya Das's "The Ultimate Neolab List" (October 2026) included Basecamp Research but rated it a borderline entry, on the grounds that it trains its own large biological models but is a 2019 company with wet-lab and therapeutics work that raised money gradually. ^[36]

See also

• List of neolabs
• Neolab
• Protein design
• Evo 2
• Cradle
• NVIDIA BioNeMo
• Claude Science

References

1. ^1 ^2 ^3 ^4 ^5 ^6 ^7 ^8BioSpace, "Basecamp Research Initiates Genetic Medicine Collaboration with the Liu Laboratory and Completes $60 Million Series B Financing," October 9, 2024.
2. ^1 ^2 ^3 ^4 ^5 ^6 ^7 ^8BioPharma Dive, "AI startup Basecamp allies with the Broad to dream up 'programmable' genetic medicines," October 9, 2024.
3. ^1 ^2 ^3 ^4 ^5 ^6 ^7 ^8 ^9 ^10 ^11 ^12 ^13 ^14GlobeNewswire / Basecamp Research, "Basecamp Research Announces Breakthrough Discovery of Over One Million New Species," June 11, 2025.
4. ^1 ^2 ^3 ^4 ^5PR Newswire, "Basecamp Research Launches BaseFold: A Breakthrough in 3D Protein Structure Prediction of Large, Complex Protein Structures," March 12, 2024.
5. ^HPCwire, "Graphing Biodiversity to Improve Drug Discovery," February 20, 2025.
6. ^1 ^2 ^3 ^4 ^5 ^6 ^7Fortune, "Could data from 100 million species help cure disease? One startup is betting on it," March 19, 2026.
7. ^1 ^2 ^3 ^4 ^5NutraIngredients, "Basecamp Research raises $20M to map life on earth and design proteins to match," December 21, 2022.
8. ^1 ^2 ^3 ^4 ^5 ^6True Ventures, "Basecamp Research: Accelerating AI Driven Insights with NVIDIA to Build the World's Largest and Most Diverse Biological Sequence Dataset."
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33. ^1 ^2Dan Taylor, Tech.eu, "Looking to the past to engineer the future, Basecamp Research raises $20 million," December 14, 2022.
34. ^1 ^2Glen-Oliver F. Gowers, Oliver Vince, John-Henry Charles, Ingeborg Klarenberg, Tom Ellis and Arwyn Edwards, "Entirely Off-Grid and Solar-Powered DNA Sequencing of Microbial Communities during an Ice Cap Traverse Expedition," Genes 10(11): 902, November 7, 2019.
35. ^1 ^2Nebius, "Nebius AI Cloud arrives in UK with one of the country's first advanced NVIDIA AI infrastructure deployments," November 6, 2025.
36. ^Debarghya Das, "The Ultimate Neolab List," snapshot of October 27, 2026.