While companies like OpenAI and Anthropic continue to popularize the idea of using ordinary language to ask artificial intelligence agents for answers to their questions, to write their proposals, or to draw pictures, a London startup called Basecamp Research has raised $60 million to tackle a new frontier: an AI that not only answers any question related to biology and the biodiversity of the natural world, but produce new insights that humans could not achieve on their own. “There is an enormous data gap that exists today where people are training [biology] models,” said Glen Gower, the CEO of Basecamp Research, in an interview. “Some of the top pharma companies the world are training models that simply don’t see enough of the natural world.
” The startup’s solution for fixing that is incredibly ambitious: it is building a massive biodiversity AI from the ground up. Gower and his co-founder Oliver Vince are both biology PhDs who met back in their undergraduate days at Oxford. The name “Basecamp Research” comes from time they spent living on an ice cap, Vince said, doing DNA sequencing using hardware they had built themselves.
“We pioneered the first mobile DNA sequencing laboratory,” he said. Basecamp Research has adapted components of that hardware “into very small units” to collect data for the newer startup, he added. There have been hundreds of books, thousands of pages of research, and megabytes of other data generated over decades in the field o.
