Cradle – a biotech startup that uses generative AI to help scientists design and engineer proteins – recently announced it has raised $24 million in Series A funding, led by Index Ventures, with participation from Kindred Capital. The leading angel investors also participated in the round, including Chris Gibson, co-founder and CEO of Recursion, and Tom Glocer, former CEO of Thomson Reuters and Lead Director of Merck. Today’s funding takes the total raised by Cradle to $33 million.
Since exiting stealth mode last year, Cradle has seen strong demand for its AI for biology technology and demonstrated the effectiveness of its platform in significantly reducing the time and cost of R&D when designing a protein-based product.
The company already onboarded nine leading industry partners in the past year, including Janssen Research & Development, Novozymes, and Twist Bioscience. And it is now working on more than 12 research and development projects focused on engineering a wide range of protein modalities, including enzymes, vaccines, peptides, and antibodies, across a broad spectrum of desired protein properties, such as stability, expression, activity, binding affinity, and specificity.
The results show that Cradle’s technology can drastically speed up the design and optimization of proteins with fewer, more successful experiments. And most projects progress two times faster using Cradle’s platform compared to industry benchmarks.
Cradle’s technology also increases the odds of success of specific R&D programs as its generative AI capabilities are able to find solutions to protein engineering challenges that humans are not capable of finding with existing tools. These advances represent major real-world gains regarding research and development of biological products – a process known for being extremely costly and time-consuming. For example, biopharma companies spend an average of $22 million and 42 months on R&D to get a single potential product ready for clinical testing.
Cradle’s progress since its seed funding round in November 2022 demonstrates the company’s ability to deliver on its founding mission: to unleash the potential of bio-based products by making it easier, quicker, and more cost-effective for scientists and experimentalists to engineer proteins that can be used in new therapeutics or to produce almost anything.
Cradle has essentially built an easy-to-use web-based software that any team of scientists and experimentalists can use without help from a bio-informatician or machine learning engineer. And the software helps break down traditional data roadblocks that challenge biotechnology companies to make their data available to use Generative AI and ML tools that will accelerate R&D pipelines. Cradle’s proprietary generative AI models are trained on billions of protein sequences and data from their wet laboratory.
Cradle will use the Series A funding round to accelerate its growth, expand its world-class machine learning and biotech team, and continue to invest in its product development and sales capabilities. And the Cradle team is currently 20 people, split between Delft, The Netherlands, and Zurich, Switzerland, with plans to expand its team in 2024. The company also plans on building out additional laboratory and engineering facilities in Amsterdam, helping to add capacity to accelerate its research and generate more data that can be used to train AI models.
The company will also continue developing its platform to allow it to onboard more customers, in line with growing demand, and to continue to evolve its user experience to ensure the platform is intuitive and accessible for scientists and experimentalists without a machine learning background.
KEY QUOTES:
“Biological products are one of the biggest tools we can deploy to improve health outcomes and reduce the environmental impact of human consumption. By using generative AI and machine learning to help biologists design and optimise proteins faster and more efficiently, we can help research and development teams innovate faster, spend less and ultimately be more successful in developing new products. In the last year we’ve been focused on demonstrating that our technology can deliver meaningful results and initiating partnerships with a number of true industry leaders. We’re thrilled with the progress to date and are excited to have closed our Series A, which gives us everything we need to build on this momentum, accelerate our growth and onboard more customers to our platform.”
— Stef van Grieken, Cradle’s CEO and co-founder
“The application of AI in biology will be transformational, helping to solve some of the biggest health and climate challenges. The early results, from projects run by companies with some of the largest R&D budgets globally, indicate that Cradle’s technology is already dramatically accelerating the pace of innovation in a field that will reshape how we produce much of what we consume. The team has continued to rapidly expand the capabilities of its platform to meet significant customer demand. It’s exciting to see how scientists leverage Cradle to design new proteins and advance this emerging field of programming biology.”
— Index Ventures partner Sofia Dolfe
