What a time to be live. The main thing happening today is Isomorphic Labs raising funding. We've also got a recap of yesterday's EF x ETN Demo Day featuring founders who might just be worth $40 billion one day too. Here's your Order of Play.
12:10 - Mike Cannon-Brookes, Co-Founder & CEO at Atlassian
13:00 - Vidya Peters, CEO at DataSnipper
13:15 - Sebastian Weidt, CEO & Co-Founder at Universal Quantum
13:30 - Dr. Patrick Jahnke, Co-CEO at Turba Labs
What’s Happening Today
Isomorphic Labs could soon be worth $40 billion despite not having a drug in clinical trials yet.
The Alphabet-backed startup is in early talks to raise funding at a valuation of at least $40 billion, and possibly as much as $50 billion according to Bloomberg. That comes just five months after it raised $2.1 billion with the UK Sovereign AI Fund among the backers. Demis Hassabis spun the company out of DeepMind in 2021 to put AlphaFold-style AI to work on drug discovery.
Isomorphic has partnerships with Eli Lilly, Novartis and Johnson & Johnson, and is building its own pipeline in cancer and immune disorders. Lilly and Novartis paid $82.5 million upfront between them when they signed in 2024, with billions more in milestones if the drugs actually work. The promise is that AI can make finding medicines dramatically faster and cheaper.
Investors are effectively betting billions on what AlphaFold and Isomorphic's technology could eventually do, rather than on a proven drug pipeline. It's yet another huge AI valuation handed out before the results are in, though few would bet against Nobel laureate Demis Hassabis.
We're getting into all of it on today's show at 12 BST.
EF x ETN: Demo Day
Yesterday we teamed up with Entrepreneur First for their Demo Day in San Francisco, with founders calling in at 6am local time to pitch us live before facing investors. They're working on everything from robots that load restaurant dishwashers to solar panels floating on giant balloons!
etn. Insight
The possibility of AI suffering is something that “actually keeps me awake at night,” says WPP Chief AI Officer Daniel Hulme, who came on the show yesterday and argued that we need to start thinking more seriously about whether machines could feel pain.
“I think we should move on from the questions of (AI) consciousness.” Instead, Hulme states we need to mitigate the risk of “building machines that could inadvertently feel suffering or pain.” He calls it “mind crime” and says “there is a dotted line to potentially building machines that could suffer.”
Watch the full clip below.
Continental Breakfast
