Rivercell Launches With $25 Million Seed Round to Build AI World Model of the Cell

Isomorphic Labs, the AI-powered drug discovery startup spun out of Alphabet's Google DeepMind, is in early talks to raise new funds at a valuation of at least $40B, according to Bloomberg. The round could value Isomorphic as highly as $50B, one of the sources said, though the financing has not closed and details could change. The talks come only five months after Isomorphic Labs raised $2.1B in its Series B funding effort. Separately, the US government and tech giants Meta Platforms and Google parent Alphabet are joining nonprofit Biohub to build open datasets to train AI models for biological research, bringing total investment in the effort to $1.8B, Biohub said on Wednesday. Meta, Google DeepMind and Isomorphic Labs are jointly investing $300M in that effort.

The US government, Meta Platforms, and Google parent Alphabet are joining the nonprofit research organization Biohub to build open datasets for training artificial intelligence models for biological research. Biohub announced the move on the 7th, and total investment in the effort is expected to reach $1.8 billion. Meta, Google's DeepMind, and drug-discovery startup Isomorphic Labs will jointly invest $300 million in Biohub. The US Department of Energy will contribute more than $500 million over the next five years for laboratory measurement, modeling, and computation, while the National Institutes of Health will provide more than $500 million in federal funding to coordinate datasets and repositories built to date, which Biohub will standardize for AI training. Biohub is run as a philanthropic effort by Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan.

Therna Biosciences appointed Kevin Green, former Chief Business Officer of Inceptive, as Chief Operating Officer and added two AI technical leaders to its advisory team, while the NIH Common Fund selected the company as a Phase I winner of its Targeting RNA in Disease with Novel Technologies Challenge. Green, who joined Therna in August and brings more than 20 years of experience across AI-enabled drug discovery and RNA therapeutics, leads the company's operations and business development as its RNA-Logix platform moves into partnered and internal programs. The new AI advisors are Dr. Dave Burke, the first Chief Technology Officer of Arc Institute and previously Vice President of Engineering for Android at Google, and Mr. Harsh Mehta, co-founder and CTO of Mirendil and previously a Senior Research Scientist at Anthropic and a researcher at Google. Therna is one of 25 Phase I winners of the three-phase TRDNT Challenge, which offers up to $13.1 million in total awards as teams develop and validate their technologies through 2027. Therna's winning proposal introduces a co-scientist agent built on RNA-Logix that designs and optimizes sequence-specific activating antisense oligonucleotides for ultra-rare haploinsufficiencies.

insitro announced that the advanced machine learning models it built with Eli Lilly and Company to predict in vitro and in vivo properties of small molecules are now available to certain biotech companies through Lilly TuneLab. The models were trained on multi-species preclinical data that Lilly generated over decades of research from hundreds of thousands of unique molecules, offering an alternative to the industry standard method of extrapolation from in vitro assays. The collaboration, announced in September 2025, paired insitro's computational and AI/ML expertise with Lilly's proprietary preclinical dataset of in vitro and in vivo measurements across compounds with established ADMET properties. The in vivo PK models are a critical component of insitro's TherML platform for small molecule discovery, alongside machine learning and physics-based in silico screening, affinity models powered by proprietary adaptive DNA-encoded libraries generating data up to 1B compound scale, and an active-learning medicinal chemistry design engine. Lilly TuneLab is part of Lilly Catalyze360, alongside Lilly Ventures, Lilly Gateway Labs, and Lilly ExploR&D, and is built on a federated learning infrastructure hosted by a third-party provider.