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AI drug-discovery platform Isomorphic secures $600M

Author

Alex Wilhelm
March 31, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 6 minutes

Top News

  • Isomorphic snags a huge round: A Google DeepMind spinout just raised $600 million, making it instantly one of the best-funded startups in the market and a heavyweight in the realm of applied AI. Google has made progress towards applying AI to biology — Alphafold comes to mind — meaning that Isomorphic is hardly starting from scratch. What’s all the capital for? Running biotechnology experiments on silicon. The future is near, and we’re adding Isomorphic to the TWiST500, of course.

  • Temporal defends its ZIRP valuation: Temporal is a startup that helps customers with microservice orchestration. Microservices are small blocks of code that do something specific. Combine microservices, and you get an app. If you are a Factorio player, microservices are akin to individual blocks in your city block megabase design. Video game analogies aside, Temporal just locked up $146 million at a valuation of around $1.5 billion, around the same price at which it set its worth in its last newly-priced investment back in early 2022. We love seeing unicorns grow into their valuations, and with a new AI-friendly strategy and R&D budget galore, Temporal is firing on all cylinders.

  • GlobalFoundries + Microelectronics? Remember when AMD spun out its fab business, and the company — GlobalFoundaries — went public? Well, that company is now considering a merger with what Nikkei Asia calls “Taiwan's No. 2 chipmaker.” The goal? Melding a US-HQ’d chip company with a Taiwanese heavyweight to create a massive domestic concern. Of course, TSMC is investing in the United States and Intel has a foundries business, but who doesn’t want more, larger, and more powerful chip companies here at home?

TWiST500

Past adding Temporal and Isomorphic to the now more than 300 companies on the TWiST500, we have to circle back to a prior addition: Cerebras Systems.

The company makes chips that run AI workloads. It grew big enough to go public, but a few issues cropped up after it filed late last year. First, revenue concentration. I wrote about the problem here, but the gist is that Cerebras mostly sells to G42, the UAE-based AI research and compute provider. If you are taking a company public, doing so while leaning heavily on a slim customer list is risky.

More recently, we learned that the company’s IPO was also hung up with a national security issue. The sticking point? A “review of a $335 million investment by Abu Dhabi-based cloud computing and AI company G42,” Reuters wrote a week ago.

Now, good news! Bloomberg reports that the problem has been resolved:

Cerebras Systems Inc. said it has resolved “all open issues” with the Committee on Foreign Investment in the US, a crucial step that may clear the chip startup’s path for its much-anticipated initial public offering.

How did the problem get squashed? By deleting voting rights on the shares that G42 wants to buy. Solved.

Now, Cerebras can go public, and we’re hungrily awaiting an S-1/A filing from the company! — Alex


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This Week in Startups

E2103: On an all-new founder-focused TWiST, Lon, Jason, and Alex explore the 11x controversy: did the startup go TOO FAR in promoting its past clients, or was this just a simple oversight? PLUS the gang considers China’s massive growth in both AI and EVs and chat about VC Gili Raanan’s insightful “four persona” theory on startup growth.

E2102: On a shockingly Jason-free episode of This Week in Startups (he was traveling!), Lon and Alex talk about 23andMe’s dramatic collapse and MicroStrategy’s Bitcoin mega-strategy. PLUS we’re featuring THREE fresh interviews with the teams behind some of our favorite startups: Etched, Skyflow, and MedServe.

E2101: On an all-new This Week in Startups, Jason, Lon and Alex answer burning questions from founders and entrepreneurs about running their companies, from smoothing out collaborations to building your products in public. THEN, more creators are jumping in with their own Tesla self-driving experiments, TechCrunch quietly sold itself to Regent, and much much more good stuff.

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