AI-Powered Protein Design Startup Cradle Secures $24M Series A Led by Index Ventures, Backed by Johnson & Johnson

Nov 28, 2023 18:28 CST Updated 18:28

Cradle

Biotechnology Researcher

According to Bloomberg, on November 27, the European biotechnology startup CradleRaised $24 million in Series A.

This funding is mainly used for expanding generative AI in protein design and engineering.

This round of financing was led by Index Ventures, a veteran European venture capital firm, with participation from Kindred Capital and others.RecursionCo-founder and CEO Chris Gibson and former CEO of Thomson Reuters and Chairman of Merck & Co., Tom Glocer.

So far, Cradle has raised a total of $33 million in funding, including its seed round last year.

Cradle was founded in 2021, with offices in Delft, Netherlands, and Zurich. Customers includeJohnson & JohnsonCompany, Novozymes A/S, and Twist Bioscience Corp.

The companyUsing Generative Artificial Intelligence to Help Scientists Design and Engineer Proteins, to build easy-to-use web-based software that any team of scientists and experimenters can use without the help of bioinformaticians or machine learning engineers.

Currently, the company is collaborating on over 12 R&D projects, focusing on designing various protein patterns, includingEnzymes, Vaccines, Peptides, and Antibodies, covering a wide range of desired protein properties such as stability, expression, activity, binding affinity, and specificity.

"The results show that,Cradle's technology can significantly accelerate protein design and optimization through fewer, more successful experiments.," said Stef van Grieken, co-founder and CEO, who once led product development at Google Brain.

Compared with the industry benchmark, the majority of projects use the Cradle platform.The progress needs to be twice as fast.. Its technology also increases the chances of success for specific R&D projects, as its generative AI capabilities can find solutions to protein engineering challenges that humans cannot solve using existing tools.

Cradle states that generative artificial intelligence capabilities can enhance the chances of addressing protein engineering challenges that current tools cannot solve.

For example, biopharmaceutical companies spend an average of $22 million and 42 months of research time to prepare a single potential product for clinical testing. Even so, only about one-third of them proceed to clinical trials.

"This field is still in its early stages; we might be at the GPT 0.5 stage," Van Grieken said in a video interview. "Many cutting-edge startups are beginning to establish themselves at the intersection of science and artificial intelligence."

Cradle's network software enables biotech companies to more easily utilize their data for generating AI and machine learning tools.

The company, which has around 20 machine learning engineers and biotechnology researchers, plans to use the new funds to expand the team and build more engineering and laboratory facilities.

"Artificial intelligence applied to biology will be transformative," said Sofia Dolfe, partner at Index Ventures.

Reference link:

https://endpts.com/european-ai-startup-raises-24m-for-protein-design-software-service/

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