Cradle Bio BVa platform that accelerates protein discovery using generative artificial intelligence models, announced today that it raised $73 million to expand its laboratory 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 over $100 million.

Cradle’s platform enables scientists to accelerate protein discovery and development by accelerating the engineering process. It does this by significantly facilitating the determination of potential new protein creation pathways to reduce the number of experimental runs needed in the laboratory to test and deliver new designs.

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

Traditional processes for protein products are slow and expensive because they often rely on trial and error. They rely on wet labs and require multiple laboratory cycles where proteins are created and SO tested. Therapeutic or chemical testing can then take years and cost hundreds of millions of dollars, which can lead to a dead end.

Cradle’s AI-based platform works similarly to OpenAI’s ChatGPT generative AI capability. it 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 protein sequences to produce new proteins based on what scientists want them to do and which they can then test in the lab.

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

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

Customers using the platform retain all intellectual property rights to the engineered proteins and maintain strict controls over the data, the company said. It is also adaptable to several industries, including pharmaceutical and industrial.

This funding comes at a time when AI is revolutionizing pharmaceutical and protein research. This trend has attracted numerous investments in the industry, particularly for Finding the base camp, Evolutionary Scale Inc. And Terray Therapeutic. Artificial Intelligence-Driven 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 analytics 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 some of the new funding to expand its lab to generate new data sets 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