Cradle Raises $73M for Gen-AI Protein Engineering
Cradle has secured $73 million in a Series B funding round led by IVP, bringing its total funding to over $100 million. This investment accelerates the adoption of Cradle’s generative AI platform for protein engineering, which is already being deployed in industries such as pharmaceuticals, diagnostics, agriculture, and chemicals.
The funding will support the expansion of Cradle’s wet lab operations, enhancements in machine learning capabilities, and growth of its AI research, sales, and operations teams.
Recently, Cradle appointed Sam Partovi as Chief Commercial Officer. With over 20 years of experience scaling cloud-based platforms in the life sciences industry, Sam brings deep expertise from leadership roles at Medidata, Benchling, and Veeva Systems. His appointment comes as Cradle scales its AI-powered protein engineering platform, which has already demonstrated 1.5x to 12x acceleration in protein development timelines.
Cradle’s platform leverages generative AI, built on protein-specific adaptations of language models, to design sequences optimized for desired properties such as stability, binding affinity, or manufacturability. Unlike traditional methods, which often rely on trial-and-error across 10–20 experimental rounds lasting months and costing up to hundreds of thousands of dollars per cycle, Cradle’s AI predicts viable protein variants in fewer iterations.
By continuously fine-tuning its models with customer-provided lab results, the platform adapts to specific experimental contexts, enabling targeted sequence suggestions. This approach not only accelerates timelines by up to twelve-fold but also uncovers novel, non-obvious mutations that traditional methods often miss, helping prevent stalled projects and increasing overall success rates.
Cradle’s platform key features:
- AI-Optimized Protein Engineering: Uses gen-AI to design improved protein variants to accelerate timelines by refining sequences with each experimental round, and to reduce the need for trial-and-error.
- Multi-Property Optimization: Handles multiple objectives like activity, stability, and solubility in a single round, streamlining the process for complex protein engineering projects.
- Seamless and Secure Integration: Fits into existing workflows with options to import assay data or start from a single sequence. Data remains private and secure, with users retaining full intellectual property rights.
- Comprehensive Applications: Supports diverse protein types, including enzymes, vaccines, and antibodies.
Stef van Grieken, CEO of Cradle, commented:
“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.”
In our interviews with Stef van Grieken and Elise de Reus earlier this year, they shared how Cradle’s platform helped a biotech partner optimize a key P450 enzyme, nearly tripling its activity in just three experimental rounds — 4x faster than traditional methods. They also revealed details about Cradle’s collaboration with Ginkgo Bioworks, enabling on-demand, high-throughput experiments that deliver actionable protein data in six weeks, cutting typical timelines by half.
Topics: Startups & Deals
