Using AI to accelerate biotechnology is quickly becoming standard practice, and companies providing services to rapidly deploy this technology are seeing significant uptake and new investment. One such company is Cradle, which focuses on protein design and just raised $73 million to build out its lab and team.
Cradle emerged in 2022 as part of a wave of companies exploring the use of language models in biotech. The company's founder and CEO, Steph Van Grieken, memorably called strings of amino acids and bases “an alien programming language,” but AI models can still be parsed to some extent. It's a language.
The company's approach was to accelerate testing of large biomolecules like proteins (which serve myriad purposes in medicine and industry) by finding and recommending sequences that influence desired qualities. So, if you have a useful protein but want to make it more heat resistant, the model looks for sequences that tend to degrade at higher temperatures, offering alternatives that otherwise leave its function unchanged. .
After securing a $24 million A round in 2023, Cradle has steadily served customers in the biotech and pharmaceutical sectors. Van Grieken said companies are primarily focused on acceleration and cost savings from having to run fewer experiments to get molecules where they need to go.
“Companies that develop products, such as antibody therapeutics for specific diseases or enzymes for detergents, typically develop several products to improve the effectiveness, safety, and manufacturability of their proteins,” he said in an email to TechCrunch. We will conduct ten experiments.”
Mockup of protein analysis process – greatly simplified of course. Image credit: Cradle
These experimental rounds can cost tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars and take a significant amount of time. It goes without saying that guesswork and luck are factors. Careful research and intuition contribute to results, but there is inevitably a lot of unpredictability in this area, and ways to reduce it are welcome.
He also pointed out that the simple SaaS business model is proving popular because there is no need to worry about royalties, revenue sharing, or intellectual property issues.
Van Grieken pointed out that the competition is divided into two groups along these lines. One is groups that work in close partnership to co-develop medicines and processes, and the other is groups that strictly provide software services, such as Cradle. “We believe that AI in drug discovery and development will eventually become a commodity and every team will have access to AI,” he said.
But even though Cradle makes software, it's still a biotech company.
“We have a lab in Amsterdam where we do A/B testing for different types of proteins and create a ‘foundational dataset’ that helps models learn protein properties that benefit all of our customers. ”, says van Grieken. You should also regularly train your models from these datasets and fine-tune them yourself.
The $73 million round, led by IVP with participation from Index Ventures and Kindred Capital, will be used to build out the wet lab and hire a full range of talent.
“Our current goal is to get Cradle's software into the hands of one million scientists,” van Grieken said in a press release.