Tierra Biosciences, a company that has built a platform for predictive AI-guided cell-free technology offering high-throughput on-demand custom protein synthesis, announced today that it closed an $11.4 million Series A funding round. Material Impact led this funding round with participation from new/existing investors like Prosus Ventures, In-Q-Tel (IQT), Hillspire, Freeflow Ventures, Creative Ventures, and Social Capital.
Tierra has established relationships with major pharmaceutical, industrial, and agricultural organizations and the funding will help expand the company’s reach and extend its capabilities to a wider set of customers and partners. The funding will also play a major role in advancing Tierra’s predictive AI utilizing the large and growing closed-loop synthesis parameter data lake generated from its centralized manufacturing of thousands of proteins.
In developing high-throughput cell-free platforms and deploying the latest advancements in AI language models, Tierra leverages its exclusive data to manufacture transformative proteins optimally. Proteins – which are essential molecules found across all life forms – demonstrate remarkable diversity in structure and function, stemming from a modest set of amino acid building blocks. And its involvement in nearly every biological process underscores their paramount significance in sustaining life and offering substantial therapeutic value.
KEY QUOTES:
“Traditional protein engineering using living cells is slow, inefficient, and data poor. Tierra’s cell-free protein production platform will change the game, powering our customers’ discovery efforts with rapid access to large numbers of discrete custom proteins for screening and discovery, plus fast yield scale-up for downstream development and pilot work.”
– Michael Nemzek, Tierra CEO
“Tierra’s platform propels innovation in the bioeconomy by eliminating bottlenecks in protein discovery and manufacturing. We’re excited to partner with them as they fuse high-throughput manufacturing with artificial intelligence, promising not only to reshape the landscape of protein synthesis but also to revolutionize entire industries.”
– Corinna Chen, Partner at Material Impact
“Tierra’s cutting-edge platform, powered by advanced cell-free technology, is compelling in its ability to play a key role in building critical bio-infrastructure. We believe the result will be a transformative acceleration of protein design-build-test-learn cycles within the industry.”
– Chenny Zhang, Principal, Investments at IQT
