Cradle Secures $24 Million Series A Funding to Advance Generative AI for Protein Design
Cradle
Biotechnology Researcher
Index Ventures
Venture Capital Firm
Kindred Capital
Venture Capital Firms
Compiled by Zhiyao Bang
On November 28, 2023, utilizingGenerative Artificial IntelligenceBiotech Startup Helping Scientists Design and Manufacture Proteins Cradle Announcement Completed$24 millionSeries A financing.
This round of financing was led by Index Ventures, with participation from Kindred Capital. Renowned angel investors also joined this round, bringing Cradle's total financing to $33 million.
Since its launch in 2022, Cradle's bio-AI technology has seen strong demand and proven the effectiveness of its platform in significantly reducing R&D time and costs for protein product design.
Accelerate Protein Design and Optimization
In the past year,Cradle Partnerships have been established with nine leading industry partners, including Janssen R&D, Novozymes, and Twist Bioscience. The company is currently working on more than 12 R&D projects, focusing on the engineering of various protein therapeutics, including enzymes, vaccines, peptides, and antibodies, covering a wide range of desired protein characteristics such as stability, expression, activity, binding affinity, and specificity.
Research results to date indicate that Cradle's technology can significantly accelerate protein design and optimization with fewer, yet more successful experiments. Compared to industry benchmarks, most projects using the Cradle platform progress twice as fast. Cradle’s technology also increases the success rate of specific R&D projects because its AI-driven capabilities can solve protein engineering challenges that existing human tools cannot address.
In the development of bioproducts, these advances represent significant practical benefits, as the R&D process for bioproducts has historically been extremely costly and time-consuming. For instance, biopharmaceutical companies typically need to spend an average of $22 million and 42 months on R&D to advance a potential product to the clinical trial stage, with only about 35% of projects making it to that stage.
Cradle's progress since securing seed funding in November 2022 demonstrates the company's ability to fulfill its founding mission: to enable scientists and lab researchers to design proteins more conveniently, quickly, and cost-effectively for new therapies or the production of virtually any product, thereby unlocking the potential of bio-based products.
Using AI-Generated Technology to Create Products for Human and Planetary Health
Biology can be used to manufacture a wide range of products across various industries, from sustainable alternatives to pharmaceuticals or food, to raw materials for detergents and plastics, clothing, or electronics that do not rely on petrochemicals, and even more complex products such as enzymes capable of breaking down plastics and other pollutants or emissions.
Cradle has developed an easy-to-use software that any scientist and experimenter can utilize without the assistance of a bioinformatician or machine learning engineer. The software helps break down traditional data barriers, enabling biotech companies to harness their data for generative AI and machine learning tools that accelerate the R&D process. Cradle's proprietary generative AI models are trained on billions of protein sequences as well as data generated from their own wet lab experiments.
Cradle will use this Series A financing to accelerate development, expand its world-class machine learning and biotechnology team, and continue investing in product development and sales capabilities.
Cradle Team Expands to 20 Members Across Delft, Netherlands and Zurich, Switzerland, with Plans for Further Growth by 2024The Cradle team currently consists of 20 members distributed between Delft, Netherlands and Zurich, Switzerland, with plans to expand further in 2024. The company also intends to build additional laboratory and engineering facilities in Amsterdam to enhance capabilities, accelerate research, and generate more data for training artificial intelligence models. Additionally, the company will continue to develop its platform to accommodate a growing number of clients based on increasing demand, while further refining the user experience to ensure the platform remains intuitive and accessible for scientists and researchers without a machine learning background.
CEO and Co-founder of CradleStef van Grieken, indicating thatBiological products are one of the greatest tools we can use to improve health conditions and reduce the environmental impact of human consumption. By utilizing generative artificial intelligence and machine learning to assist biologists in designing and optimizing proteins more quickly and efficiently, we can help R&D teams innovate faster, spend less, and ultimately achieve greater success in developing new products. Over the past year, we have been committed to demonstrating that our technology can deliver meaningful results, and we have established partnerships with some true industry leaders. We are very excited about the progress we’ve made so far, and we’re thrilled to have completed our Series A funding round, which provides us with everything we need to build on this momentum, accelerate our growth, and bring more customers onto our platform.
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