Dutch-Swiss biotech startup Cradle comes out of stealth, bags €5.5M to design protein

Delft and Zurich-based Cradle, a platform that helps scientists design and program proteins, announced on Thursday that it has come out of stealth and raised €5.5M in a Seed round of funding. 

The round was co-led by Index Ventures and Kindred Capital with participation from angel investors, including Feike Sijbesma, Honorary Chairman and former CEO of Royal DSM, and Emily Leproust, founder of Twist Bioscience. 

The Dutch-Swiss company says it will use the funds to accelerate product development, build its offering in programmable biology, scale its team, and support the onboarding of more design partners. 

What does Cradle solve?

Synthetic biology is a multidisciplinary area of research that involves adapting the genes of bacteria and fungi to create ‘cell factories’ that use programmable proteins to produce various everyday products. 

The product ranges from milk and meat (without farming animals) to plastics (without petrochemicals, materials for clothing, or electronic components), and even personalised medicines. 

A report from McKinsey Global Institute has predicted that 60 per cent of everything humans consume could be produced using cell factories. 

However, the challenge that biologists face is that building proteins is costly, slow, and based on trial and error.

And here’s where Cradle comes into the play

Stef van Grieken, Cradle’s CEO and co-founder, says, “You can think of cells like tiny factories, with proteins as the assembly lines and machines that allow them to make different end-products. With the right tweaks, we can make proteins that will make all manner of new products far more efficiently and with a much lower environmental impact. A biologist can spend years finding the right solution to any particular problem with current methods.” 

“By harnessing the power of machine learning, our platform can substantially speed up the design, build, and scaling phases when bioengineering proteins, making it possible to create and scale synthetic biology projects much faster and more cost-effectively. We aim to reduce the cost and time of getting a bio-based product to market by order of magnitude so that anyone – even’ two kids in their garage’ – can bring a bio-based product to market,” he adds.

Cradle: What you need to know

Founded in 2021, Cradle empowers scientists to ‘reverse engineer’ proteins with the desired specific properties and has built a working platform already used by several early-stage design partners. 

The company’s machine learning platform helps scientists to design and program ‘cell factories’ faster and improve the chances of getting the experimental results they want. 

Cradle intends to make its solution accessible to scientists without a machine learning background through an intuitive and collaborative online platform. 

Cradle’s operations include a ‘wet lab,’ which allows the company to generate data to train its machine learning models. It has offices in Delft, The Netherlands, and Zurich, Switzerland, with a team of machine learning and biotech research specialists.

Investor

Index Ventures is a venture capital firm based in London, San Francisco and Geneva, helping entrepreneurs turn bold ideas into transformative international businesses. The VC has invested in companies such as Adyen, Deliveroo, Dropbox, Farfetch, King, Slack, and Supercell.

Sofia Dolfe, the partner who co-led the investment for Index Ventures, says, “It’s early days for synthetic biology, but it’s hugely significant for humanity and will grow exponentially. We believe this technology could transform how we produce almost everything, from food and medicine to the raw materials used for various consumer products. The Cradle team’s depth of expertise, degree of focus, and speed of development set them apart. They’re ideally placed on defining a new category around programmable biology, creating the design tools scientists need to precision-engineer proteins and dramatically improve human and planetary health.”