Cradle Secures $73M to Advance AI-Driven Protein Engineering Platform

AI-driven protein discovery platform Cradle raises $73M - SiliconANGLE

Cradle Bio B.V., a platform that accelerates the discovery of proteins using generative artificial intelligence models, announced today that it raised $73 million to expand its lab and workforce. The company's Series B funding round was led by IVP with participation from previous investors Index Ventures and Kindred Capital. With today's funding, Cradle has raised over $100 million. Cradle's platform allows scientists to speed the discovery and development of proteins by enabling a faster engineering process. It does this by making it significantly easier to determine new potential protein creation pathways to reduce the number of experimental rounds needed in the lab to test and provision new designs. Proteins are at the heart of numerous products including drugs, foods and chemicals. Some proteins only come from plants or animals and we don't know how to manufacture them artificially or how to do so cost-effectively at scale. Proteins are the building blocks of medicines, eco-friendly pesticides, oil-free chemicals, plastic-like products, sustainable materials and more. Traditional processes for protein products are slow and expensive because they often rely on trial and error. They depend on wet labs and require multiple rounds in laboratory settings where proteins are created and then tested. Then therapeutic or chemical testing may take years and hundreds of millions of dollars, which might lead to a dead end. Cradle's AI-driven platform works similarly to OpenAI's ChatGPT generative AI capability that can write and edit text by using a generative protein language model. It can create protein sequences based on a vast library of billions of known working protein sequences to produce new proteins based on what scientists want them to do that they can then test in the lab. "Cradle was founded on the belief that we could solve global planetary and human health challenges by using generative AI to rapidly accelerate the development of bio-based products," said Stef van Grieken, Cradle's chief executive and co-founder. "Over the past two years, our own research and our collaborations with partners have proven that this technology can deliver remarkable results across a range of applications, from developing new vaccines and sustainable chemicals to novel diagnostics and agricultural crop protection." Van Grieken added that Cradle's platform puts the power of protein generation into the hands of scientists to build and design proteins faster than ever before. Traditional methods can require 10 to 20 experimental rounds, each taking up to eight to 12 weeks. Cradle said that can be cut down by up to 90%, resulting in cost savings of hundreds of thousands of dollars in early research. Customers using the platform retain all intellectual property rights to engineered proteins and maintain strict controls over data, the company said. It is also adaptable for multiple industries including pharmaceutical and industrial. This funding comes at a time when AI is revolutionizing pharmaceutical and protein research. This trend has attracted numerous investments to the industry including for Basecamp Research, Evolutionary Scale Inc. and Terray Therapeutics. Artificial intelligence-powered drug development startup Formation Bio Inc. raised $372 million in a Series D funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz in June. A report from market analysis firm Precedence Research reveals that the global AI drug discovery market size in 2024 is estimated at around $2.07 billion, and is expected to reach around $11.9 billion in 2033. Cradle said it would use part of the new funding to expand its laboratory to generate new datasets to train its generative protein models to make them more capable of handling more complex scenarios. The company said it will also expand its engineering team to improve its AI capabilities.

Biotech Startup Cradle Raises $73 Million to Boost Protein Engineering

The Series B funding brings Cradle's total funding to over $100 million. Amsterdam-based Cradle, an AI-powered platform revolutionising protein engineering, has secured $73 million in Series B funding to meet growing demand in research-intensive industries. Led by IVP with participation from Index Ventures and Kindred Capital, the latest round brings Cradle's total funding to over $100 million. Cradle leverages AI to help scientists design and engineer proteins faster and in a cost-effective manner. The AI startup focuses on engineering protein modalities such as enzymes, vaccines, peptides, and antibodies with the help of generative AI. Cradle focuses on engineering protein modalities such as enzymes, vaccines, peptides, and antibodies with the help of generative AI. The latest investment will support Cradle's mission to enable scientists to engineer proteins more efficiently, addressing challenges across therapeutics, diagnostics, food, chemicals, and agriculture. Industry leaders such as Novo Nordisk and Johnson & Johnson are already leveraging Cradle's generative AI platform to accelerate innovation. "A lot of the work that companies like Google, Facebook and others are doing is more in machine learning research and development. They're not trying to build tools that help biologists use these types of methods in a sort of easy fashion," said co-founder and CEO Stef Van Grieken, in an earlier interaction with AIM. Proteins, essential to products ranging from drugs to food, are at the core of Cradle's vision for sustainable and impactful solutions. Engineering these molecular "machines" can create groundbreaking innovations, such as eco-friendly pesticides, animal-free foods, and advanced therapeutics. However, traditional protein engineering methods are costly and time-consuming, often requiring years of research and millions of dollars with no guaranteed success. Cradle claims to transform this landscape by dramatically reducing the number of experimental rounds needed for protein development. For instance, one customer accelerated the activity of the P450 enzyme fourfold in just three experimental rounds, compared to the usual ten. "Over the past two years, our own research and our collaborations with partners have proven that this technology can deliver remarkable results across a range of applications, from developing new vaccines and sustainable chemicals to novel diagnostics and agricultural crop protection. Our goal is now to put Cradle's software into the hands of a million scientists and empower them to build great products," said Grieken. Cradle Team Cradle's generative protein language model is trained on billions of sequences and refined with proprietary datasets. This iterative approach allows the AI to improve predictions with each round of experimentation, saving both time and resources while significantly boosting project success rates. Unlike AlphaFold, which predicts protein structures, Cradle's generative models design protein sequences tailored to desired functions and properties. These advancements make Cradle's platform adaptable for diverse applications, including enzymes, antibodies, vaccines, and bio-based materials. Alex Lim, general partner at IVP, emphasized Cradle's transformative role. " Given the costs associated with drug discovery or similar fields of research, any efficiencies at the R&D stage will translate to both major financial returns for customers and significant real-world benefits for humanity."

Cradle builds out its protein-design AI platform (and wet lab) with $73M in new funding | TechCrunch

Using AI to accelerate biotech is fast becoming standard practice, and companies offering services to deploy the tech quickly are seeing big uptake and new investment. Cradle is one of these, focused on protein design -- and it just raised $73 million to build out its labs and team. Cradle appeared in 2022 as part of a wave of companies to exploring the use of language models in biotech. The company's founder and CEO, Stef van Grieken, memorably referred to the strings of amino acids and bases as "an alien programming language," but one that an AI model can still parse to some extent. The company's approach was to accelerate testing of large biomolecules like proteins (which serve countless purposes in medicine and industry) by attempting to find and recommend sequences that affect desirable qualities. So, if you have a useful protein but want it to be more resistant to heat, the model looks for sequences that tend to break down at warmer temperatures and offers alternatives that won't change its functions otherwise. After a $24 million A round in 2023, Cradle has been plugging away serving customers in the biotech and pharma spaces. Van Grieken said companies primarily value the acceleration and cost savings that come with having to do fewer experimental runs to get the molecule where they want it. "Companies developing products like antibody therapeutics against a certain disease or enzymes for a detergent will typically run dozens of experimental rounds to improve the efficacy, safety, and manufacturability of their protein," he said in an email to TechCrunch. These experimental rounds can cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars and take a good deal of time. Not to mention the guesswork and luck that factor into it -- while careful study and intuition contribute to the result, there is unavoidably a lot of unpredictability in this space, and any method of reducing it is welcome. He also noted that their simple SaaS business model has proven popular, as there's no need to worry about royalties, revenue share, or IP issues. Competition, van Grieken noted, is split into two groups along those lines: those doing close partnerships to co-develop a drug or process, and those, like Cradle, strictly providing a software service. "We believe that AI in drug discovery and development will ultimately be a commodity and any team should have access to it," he said. But even though Cradle makes software, it's still a biotech company. "We have a laboratory in Amsterdam where we use to A/B test on many different types of proteins as well as develop 'Foundational Datasets' that help models learn properties of proteins that benefit all of our customers," van Grieken said. And they must regularly train and fine-tune models from these datasets themselves, as well. The $73 million round, led by IVP, with Index Ventures and Kindred Capital participating, will go toward building out the wet lab and hiring up all around. "Our goal is now to put Cradle's software into the hands of a million scientists," van Grieken said in a press release.