Cradle builds its AI protein design platform (and wet lab) with new $73M funding

Using AI to accelerate biotech is becoming mainstream, and companies that provide services to deploy the technology are quickly seeing huge acquisitions and new investments. Cradle is one of these, specializing in protein synthesis – and recently raised $73 million to build out its labs and team.

Cradle emerged in 2022 as part of several companies to explore the use of language models in biotech. The company’s founder and CEO, Stef van Grieken, memorably called the strings of amino acids and bases an “unknown programming language,” but that’s an AI model that can still analyze to some extent.

The company’s approach was to accelerate the testing of large biomolecules such as proteins (which serve countless purposes in medicine and industry) by trying to find and optimize sequences that affect desirable properties. So, if you have a protein that’s useful but you want it to be heat resistant, the model looks for sequences that tend to break at warm temperatures and provides alternatives that wouldn’t otherwise alter its functions.

After a $24 million round in 2023, Cradle has been connecting to serving clients in the biotech and pharma areas. Van Grieken said companies primarily value the speed and cost savings associated with doing fewer test runs to get the molecule where they want it.

“Companies developing products such as immunotherapy drugs against a specific disease or cleaning enzymes will often use multiple rounds of testing to improve the efficacy, safety, and performance of their proteins,” he said in an email to TechCrunch.

These testing cycles can cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars and take a good amount of time. Not to mention the guesswork and luck involved in it – while careful study and insight contribute to the outcome, there are many unpredictable inevitabilities in this space, and any mitigation is welcome.

He also noted that their simple SaaS business model has proven popular, as there is no need to worry about royalties, revenue share, or IP issues.

The competition, van Grieken noted, is divided into two groups along those lines: those who form close partnerships to develop a drug or process, and those, like Cradle, who provide strictly a software service. “We believe that AI in drug discovery and development will eventually become an asset and any group should have access to it,” he said.

But even though Cradle makes software, it’s still a biotech company.

“We have a laboratory in Amsterdam where we use A/B testing on many types of proteins and develop ‘Foundational Datasets’ that help models learn protein structures that benefit all our customers,” says van Grieken. And they have to regularly train and refine models from these datasets. itself, too.

The $73 million round, led by IVP, with Index Ventures and Kindred Capital participating, will go toward building a wet lab and leasing the entire facility.

“Our goal now is to put Cradle software in the hands of a million scientists,” van Grieken said in a press release.