Cradle Bio B.V., a platform that accelerates the discovery of proteins using generative artificial intelligence models, announced today that it has raised $73 million to expand its lab and workforce.

The company’s Series B funding round was led by IVP with participation from previous investors Index Ventures and Kindred Capital. With today’s funding, Cradle has raised more than $100 million.

Cradle’s platform allows scientists to speed the discovery and development of proteins by enabling a faster engineering process. It does this by making it significantly easier to determine new potential protein creation pathways to reduce the number of experimental rounds needed in the lab to test and provision new designs.

Proteins are at the heart of many products, including drugs, foods and chemicals. Some proteins only come from plants or animals and we don’t know how to manufacture them artificially or how to do so cost-effectively at scale. Proteins are the building blocks of medicines, eco-friendly pesticides, oil-free chemicals, plastic-like products, sustainable materials and more.

Traditional processes for protein products are slow and expensive because they often rely on trial and error. They depend on wet labs and require multiple rounds in laboratory settings where proteins are created and then tested. Then therapeutic or chemical testing may take years and hundreds of millions of dollars, which might lead to a dead end.

Cradle’s AI-driven platform works similarly to OpenAI’s ChatGPT generative AI capability that can write and edit text by using a generative protein language model. It can create protein sequences based on a vast library of billions of known working protein sequences to produce new proteins based on what scientists want them to do that they can then test in the lab.

“Cradle was founded on the belief that we could solve global planetary and human health challenges by using generative AI to rapidly accelerate the development of bio-based products,” said co-founder and Chief Executive Stef van Grieken. “Over the past two years, our own research and our collaborations with partners have proven that this technology can deliver remarkable results across a range of applications, from developing new vaccines and sustainable chemicals to novel diagnostics and agricultural crop protection.”

Van Grieken added that Cradle’s platform puts the power of protein generation into the hands of scientists to build and design proteins faster than ever before. Traditional methods can require 10 to 20 experimental rounds, each taking up to eight to 12 weeks. Cradle said that can be cut down by up to 90%, resulting in cost savings of hundreds of thousands of dollars in early research.

Customers using the platform retain all intellectual property rights to engineered proteins and maintain strict controls over data, the company said. It’s also adaptable for multiple industries such as pharmaceutical and industrial.

This funding comes at a time when AI is revolutionizing pharmaceutical and protein research. This trend has attracted many investments to the industry, including for Basecamp Research, Evolutionary Scale Inc. and Terray Therapeutics. Artificial intelligence-powered drug development startup Formation Bio Inc. raised $372 million in a Series D funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz in June.

A report from market analysis firm Precedence Research reveals that the global AI drug discovery market size in 2024 is estimated at around $2.07 billion, and is expected to reach around $11.9 billion in 2033.

Cradle said it will use part of the new funding to expand its laboratory to generate new datasets to train its generative protein models to make them more capable of handling more complex scenarios. The company said it will also expand its engineering team to improve its AI capabilities.

Image: Cradle