Demis Hassabis on his rush to ‘solve all disease’ and Isomorphic’s new $2.1 billion

We’re always running out of time, but that’s something Demis Hassabis reckons with more than most. Hassabis regularly works until 4 AM, and that’s partly the nature of leading AI at Alphabet. The Google Deep Mind cofounder also has another company: Isomorphic Labs, the AI drug discovery startup he spun out of Google in 2021. I profiled Hassabis and Isomorphic earlier this year, and caught up with him recently as the company hit a new milestone: This month, Isomorphic raised a new $2.1 billion Series B, led by Thrive Capital, with the intention of “turbocharging” its next phase. That means scaling compute, generating more data, and building out programs. (Though we covered the raise in Term Sheet, it only seemed right to bring you more of the interview.) So, I asked Hassabis: What can you “turbocharge,” and what will always involve friction in the grueling drug discovery process? “Wherever there’s friction, we don’t really accept that, for starters,” he told Fortune. “But near-term, the obvious thing is more compute… It’s not the same amount of compute an AGI lab needs, but with more compute, the more experiments we can do, the more inferences we can run.” As Hassabis thinks about the logistics of the future, he’s also thinking about Isomorphic’s infrastructure and the possibility of automated labs: “I’ve no doubt that, at some point, we will go out and do that, but we want to get the timing right,” he said. “There’s still more research to be done on the automation piece, and on the specific repeatable steps you’d want to automate.” Drug discovery is, historically, a scientific process that involves a spectacular amount of trial and error. And often, even when a drug beats the low odds of making it to clinical trials, it’s rarer still for a new pharmaceutical to make it to full FDA approval. Isomorphic has yet to bring a drug into clinical trials. Hassabis declined to offer a timeline, but the implication is certainly that the goal is sooner rather than later. “