Cradle, a platform for AI-powered protein engineering, has raised $73 million in Series B funding. The round was led by IVP, which invested in Scoutlabs and Cribl, with participation from previous investors Index Ventures, which has backed DeepL and Wiz, and Kindred Capital, which recently backed Faircraft and PlayAI. This round takes the total investment raised by Cradle to date to over $100 million.
The investment will be used to expand the company’s wet lab to generate additional datasets that will be used to train its models to address a growing array of challenges and modalities. Cradle will also expand its engineering team to further improve its ML capabilities to better generalise across tasks and handle more complex proteins.
This round follows the recent investments in biotech startups that embrace AI such as Welsh biotech Antiverse, US-based biotech Inceptive, and others.
New appointees
Cradle recently appointed life sciences industry veteran Sam Partovi as Chief Commercial Officer, the company’s 40th hire, to help expand its impact in the biotech sector. The company will continue to expand its AI research, sales, and operations teams to help onboard more new customers, scale the business, and get its software into the hands of every scientist.
Gen AI platform for protein engineering
Proteins are at the core of many products, from pharmaceuticals to food. Engineering these molecular machines has the power to reshape our world, enabling life-changing therapeutics, animal-free foods, eco-friendly pesticides, oil-free chemicals, and more. Developing new proteins is therefore key to unlocking smarter, more sustainable solutions. However, traditional research methods for engineering better proteins have been slow, expensive, and unreliable. It can take years and many millions of dollars to run a successful R&D process and many projects are never completed successfully because they cannot achieve their targets.
Cradle’s AI platform enables scientists to accelerate the discovery and development of improved proteins by making the process of engineering better proteins easier, faster, and more cost-effective.
Founded in 2021 by Elise de Reus and Stef van Grieken (with previous experience at Google X) in Amsterdam, the team includes experts from Google, Deepmind, Novartis, Uber, Zymergen, Twist, Booking, and Stripe. Cradle’s generative AI platform helps scientists to design better proteins, up to ten times faster and more successfully, speeding up the development of new therapeutics and bio-based products such as enzymes, antibodies, and bio-based materials and chemicals.
In the last year, Cradle has significantly expanded its customer base and impact, signing new partnerships with Novo Nordisk and Ginkgo Bioworks.
Customer base
Cradle has experienced rapid growth, and is now in commercial deployment across a wide range of industries. It has grown its customer base to include pharmaceuticals, chemicals, food, agriculture, and materials.
A biotechnology customer used Cradle to accelerate the activity of the P450 enzyme by 4x in just three experimental rounds, compared to the previous 10 rounds. Cradle’s AI delivered significant value by helping to unlock a project that had previously stalled and was on a trajectory to termination. Customers retain all intellectual property rights for proteins engineered on Cradle’s platform and have strict security controls over their data.
Stef van Grieken, Cradle’s CEO and co-founder, said: “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. 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. Our goal is now to put Cradle’s software into the hands of a million scientists and empower them to build great products. Our Series B will make this next phase of growth possible and we’re delighted to have the backing of IVP to help us scale.”
Alex Lim, General Partner at IVP, commented: “Biology is one of the domains where generative AI can have the biggest positive impact and Cradle is leading the way with its pioneering approach to protein design as a digital service. Given the costs associated with drug discovery or similar fields of research, any efficiencies at the R&D stage will translate to both major financial returns for customers and significant real-world benefits for humanity. With impressive results delivered by Cradle’s platform just two years after launch, we see a bright future ahead for one of Europe’s – and the world’s – most consequential AI companies.”
