Amsterdam and Zurich-based Cradle, a biotech startup, announced on Tuesday that it has raised $73M (approximately €69.5M) in a Series B funding round led by IVP with participation from previous investors Index Ventures and Kindred Capital.
The latest funding round takes the total raised by Cradle to date over $100M (approximately €95.2M).
The Dutch-Swiss company will use the funds to expand its wet lab to generate additional datasets that will be used to train Cradle’s models to address a growing array of challenges and modalities.
The company will use the funds to expand its engineering team to further improve its ML capabilities.
The company recently appointed life sciences industry veteran Sam Partovi as Chief Commercial Officer, the 40th hire, to help expand Cradle’s impact in the biotech sector.
The Dutch-Swiss 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.
The announcement comes around a year after raising €21.92M in a Series A funding round.
Cradle: AI-powered protein engineering
Founded in 2021, Cradle‘s AI platform enables scientists to accelerate the discovery and development of improved proteins by making the process of engineering better proteins significantly easier, faster, and more cost-effective.
Cradle’s method greatly cuts down on the number of experimental rounds needed compared to traditional methods.
Companies using Cradle’s software have seen up to a 90 per cent reduction in rounds.
For example, one 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.
Traditional projects often get canceled if there isn’t a clear way to improve the protein.
However, the company’s AI can offer new and unexpected solutions, boosting the chances of success for a project.
The company has experienced rapid growth and is now in commercial deployment across a wide range of industries.
In the last year, the company has significantly expanded its customer base and impact, signing new partnerships with Novo Nordisk and Ginkgo Bioworks and growing its customer base to include pharmaceuticals, chemicals, food, agriculture, and materials.
The company also clarified that the customers keep all rights to the proteins they create on the Cradle platform and have strong security measures for their data.
The platform automatically builds models based on each customer’s goals, using their data only for training those models to protect their information.
Cradle’s platform can be used for different purposes in both pharmaceutical and industrial fields, including enzymes, antibodies, peptides, vaccines, and therapeutic proteins.
Stef van Grieken, Cradle’s CEO and co-founder, says, “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 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.”
The investor
IVP is a venture capital firm that helps breakout companies grow into enduring market leaders.
The VC has partnered with over 400 companies, including Abridge, Coinbase, Crowdstrike, Datadog, DeepL, Discord, Dropbox, GitHub, Glean, Grammarly, HashiCorp, Hims & Hers, Perplexity, Pigment, Slack, Snap, Twitter and UiPath.
Alex Lim, General Partner at IVP, comments, “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.”
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