When Demis Hassabis handed DeepMind’s day-to-day operations to Koray Kavukcuoglu, he did not leave Alphabet’s science stack. He became chair of Google DeepMind and Alphabet chief scientist, while continuing as founder and CEO of Isomorphic Labs — the AI-first drug design company he launched in 2021. The August 2026 remake splits product cadence from AGI-and-biology ambition; Hassabis keeps the second column.
In his employee note, Hassabis said AGI feels “close at hand” and that stepping back from operational control frees him for the “big picture,” including leaning further into Isomorphic’s mission to apply AI to diseases such as cancer. That is the editorial spine of this profile: not a repeat of the org chart news, but the portfolio he still runs.
The Alphabet science seat
As DeepMind chair and Alphabet chief scientist, Hassabis remains an adviser across models and research while Kavukcuoglu owns Gemini shipping lines. Pichai framed the move as enabling both frontier product acceleration and AGI/science focus. Hassabis keeps close ties to DeepMind leadership from London’s Platform 37 offices, per his note.
Isomorphic Labs: the health application
Isomorphic Labs’ own materials describe Hassabis as founder and CEO (and note his 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for AlphaFold 2 work with DeepMind). On May 12, 2026, Isomorphic announced a $2.1 billion Series B led by Thrive Capital, with participation from Alphabet and GV plus new investors including MGX, Temasek, CapitalG, and the UK Sovereign AI Fund. The company says the capital scales its AI drug design engine (IsoDDE) and advances partnered and wholly owned programs across therapeutic areas.
That funding round predates the August DeepMind titles — but it clarifies why Hassabis’s “lean into Isomorphic” line is operational, not ceremonial. Alphabet already has a commercial AI-biology vehicle with nine-figure capital intensity sitting beside DeepMind’s consumer/developer Gemini stack.
How this differs from Discovery Loop
Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat’s Discovery Loop PBC automates scientific experimentation loops as an external Alphabet-backed spin-out. Hassabis’s Isomorphic path is an Alphabet-linked drug-design company he still CEOs. Both are “science” moves in the same season; they are not the same corporate form.
Our take
In our view, Hassabis’s post-hand-off identity is a three-hat science portfolio — DeepMind chair, Alphabet chief scientist, Isomorphic CEO — while Kavukcuoglu becomes the Gemini product operator. Readers who only track consumer model leaderboards will miss half of Alphabet’s AI strategy if they ignore the biology column.
Series: DeepMind Leadership · reshuffle · Kavukcuoglu profile.
