Basecamp Research

Basecamp Research is a London-based biotechnology company founded in 2019 by Dr. Glen Gowers and Dr. Oliver Vince. The company's inception traces back to the co-founders' PhD studies in synthetic biology and bioengineering and a pivotal 2019 expedition to Iceland's Vatnajökull ice cap, where they established the first off-grid DNA sequencing operation. This experience highlighted that the majority of biological data they collected was new to science, sparking the idea that nature holds undiscovered solutions for biotechnology.

The company operates at the intersection of artificial intelligence and biology, focusing on creating the world's largest and most diverse database of genetic information. This proprietary knowledge graph, called BaseGraph™, is built through a global network of partnerships in over 25 countries, allowing Basecamp Research to ethically collect and sequence biological samples from extreme environments worldwide. The resulting dataset, BaseData™, is substantially larger and more contextually rich than public databases, containing over 12 billion proteins.

Basecamp Research's primary business model involves leveraging this extensive dataset to train its family of foundational AI models, named EDEN. These models are designed to understand the complexities of biology and design novel proteins and biological systems for specific applications. One of its notable developments is BaseFold, a deep learning model for 3D protein structure prediction that has demonstrated up to six times greater accuracy than the industry benchmark, AlphaFold2. In January 2026, the company launched aiPGI™ (AI-Programmable Gene Insertion), an AI platform capable of designing enzymes for large gene insertions at specific sites in the human genome, a significant step toward creating programmable therapies for cancer and genetic diseases.

The company serves clients across the pharmaceutical, food, and industrial sectors through partnerships. It collaborates with major pharmaceutical companies, research institutions like the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and consumer goods companies such as Procter & Gamble. These partnerships focus on developing solutions like high-performance enzymes for cold water washing and advancing programmable genetic medicines. Basecamp Research has raised a total of $85 million in funding over several rounds, including a $20 million Series A in December 2022 and a $60 million Series B in October 2024. Its investors include Systemiq Capital, Singular, True Ventures, and NVentures (NVIDIA's venture arm).

Keywords: protein design, artificial intelligence, biodiversity, genetic medicine, metagenomics, drug discovery, biological data, generative AI, synthetic biology, enzyme design, BaseFold, genome editing, foundation models, bioinformatics, gene insertion, cell therapy, aiPGI, EDEN AI, BaseGraph, biotechnology