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Using AI to accelerate biotechnology is quickly becoming standard practice, and companies that provide services to rapidly deploy the technology are seeing significant uptake and new investment. cradle One such company, focused on protein design, just raised $73 million to build out its labs and team.
Cradle emerged in 2022 as part of a wave of companies exploring the use of language models in biotech. The company’s founder and CEO, Steve van Greken, memorably referred to amino acid sequences and bases as a “weird programming language,” but one that an AI model can still parse to some degree.
The company’s approach was to speed up testing of large biomolecules such as proteins (which serve countless purposes in medicine and industry) by trying to find and recommend sequences that affect desired traits. So, if you have a useful protein but want it to be more heat-resistant, the model looks for sequences that tend to degrade at warmer temperatures and offers substitutions that wouldn’t otherwise change its functionality.
Following a $24 million round in 2023, Cradle began serving clients in the biotech and pharmaceutical industries. Companies, Van Greken said We primarily appreciate the acceleration and cost savings Which comes with having to perform fewer experiments to get the molecule to where they want it.
“Companies developing products such as antibody treatments against a specific disease or detergent enzymes will typically conduct dozens of trial rounds to improve the efficacy, safety, and manufacturability of their protein,” he said in an email to TechCrunch.
These test runs can cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars and are time-consuming. Not to mention the guesswork and luck that come into play – while careful study and intuition contribute to the outcome, it’s inevitable that there’s a lot of unpredictability in this area, and any way to reduce it is welcome.
He also noted that their simple SaaS business model has proven popular, as they don’t have to worry about royalties, revenue share, or intellectual property issues.
Van Greeken noted that the competition is divided into two groups along these lines: those who forge close partnerships to co-develop a drug or process, and those, like Cradle, that offer a strictly software service. “We believe that AI in drug discovery and development will ultimately be a commodity and one that any team should have access to,” he said.
But even though Cradle makes software, it is still a biotech company.
“We have a lab in Amsterdam where we use A/B testing on many different types of proteins, as well as developing ‘foundational datasets’ that help models learn properties of proteins that benefit all of our customers,” Van Grecken said. They must also regularly train and fine-tune models from these datasets.
The $73 million round, led by IVP, with participation from Index Ventures and Kindred Capital, will go toward building out the wet lab and hiring employees throughout.
“Our goal now is to put Cradle into the hands of a million scientists,” Van Grecken said in a press release.
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