Basecamp Research: Accelerating AI Driven Insights with NVIDIA to Build the World’s Largest and Most Diverse Biological Sequence Dataset
By Rohit Sharma, September 29, 2025
Basecamp Research’s Founders, Glen Gowers and Oliver Vince, were introduced to True by Viswa Colluru with a single compelling sentence: “Only 1% of nature’s proteins have been discovered to date, yet these underpin our daily lives and nearly all pharmaceuticals, chemicals, materials, and food. The undiscovered 99% represents the greatest untapped natural resource in history.” Viswa, the Founder and CEO of True portfolio company Enveda, went on to say that the two Founders were simply brilliant in his initial conversation.
These two ingredients, outstanding individuals and bold ambition, anchored our first meeting shortly afterward and led to a fast “all hands on deck” diligence effort by the True team to make an offer to lead Basecamp’s A-1 round. In such scenarios, we want to be the first to believe and the first to commit. Conviction and alignment with the Founders’ vision and ambition, coupled with focused execution, led us to make further significant investments in Basecamp’s Series A and Series B.
The quality of every conversation with Glen and Oliver, in addition to CTO Phil Lorenz, quickly confirmed our initial impressions about the founding team. Their original insight came from expeditions during their studies at Oxford, where they were inspired to collect specimens of organisms in various sites across the globe and to sequence them.
As they cataloged and connected the various samples together in an active graph-like map, it was clear to them that most of what they were finding was unknown previously—this “dark matter” of proteins, complete with the evolutionary context. This data held latent information that, once explored fully, could tell them the why, what, and where of new organisms and thereby open up vast new frontiers of research. This insight—reached in a tent on the Vatnajökull icecap in Iceland—was the founding moment of the phenomenal story that is now unfolding.
Image Credit: University College Oxford
Today, a mere four years later, Basecamp’s focused team has built the world’s largest and the most diverse biological sequence dataset, which in turn is leading to an unprecedented pace of discovery of new therapeutics.
The size and detail contained within Basecamp’s industry-leading databases are just the beginning. Today’s AI tools and techniques offer fast, at-scale methods of deciphering multiple complex relationships captured in its datasets, even as the company’s data grows past tens of billions of proteins and toward a trillion genomic-protein interactions. The combination of AI information processing engines and Basecamp’s protein interaction datasets is expected to rapidly accelerate the pace of discovery.
Phil has led this AI effort in collaboration with NVIDIA over the past year, and NVIDIA’s investment announcement will help Basecamp accelerate applications of its data and insights for the benefit of science and human health globally. With world-leading capabilities in infrastructure, software, and networking for this endeavor, NVIDIA is a natural and ideal partner for Basecamp.
This is a remarkable next step in the chain of discoveries that started in 1932 with the initial expedition, and we hope that in the next few years, Basecamp Research delivers many more advances in precision medicine, materials, and biochemicals.