Using AI to accelerate biotechnology is quickly becoming standard practice, and companies providing services to rapidly deploy the technology are seeing significant uptake and new investments. Cradle is one of those focused on protein design, and has raised $73 million to build its lab and team.
Cradle emerged in 2022 as part of a wave of companies exploring the use of language models in biotechnology. The company’s founder and CEO, Stef van Grieken, memorably referred to strings of amino acids and bases as an “alien programming language,” but AI models can still parse them to some extent.
The company’s approach was to accelerate testing of large biomolecules, such as proteins (which have numerous uses in medicine and industry), by finding and recommending sequences that influence desirable qualities. So if you have a useful protein, but want to make it more resistant to heat, the model would look for sequences that tend to break down at warmer temperatures, providing an alternative that would otherwise leave their function unchanged.
Following a $24 million A round in 2023, Cradle continues to serve clients in the biotech and pharmaceutical sectors. Van Grieken said companies primarily value the acceleration and cost savings that come from performing fewer experiments to get the molecules where they want them.
“Companies developing products such as antibody treatments for specific diseases or enzymes for detergents will typically run dozens of experimental rounds to improve the efficacy, safety and manufacturability of the protein,” he said in an email to TechCrunch.
These rounds of experimentation can cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars and take a significant amount of time. While careful research and intuition, not to mention guesswork and luck, contribute to the results, there’s a lot of unpredictability in this space, and any way to reduce that is welcome.
He also pointed out that simple SaaS business models are popular because they don’t have to worry about royalties, revenue sharing or IP issues.
Van Grieken pointed out that the competition is divided into two groups. One is a group that works in close partnerships to co-develop drugs or processes, and the other is a group that strictly provides software services, like Cradle. “We believe that AI in drug discovery and development will ultimately become a commodity and every team should have access to it,” he said.
But even though Cradle makes software, it’s still a biotech company.
“We have a lab in Amsterdam where we perform A/B testing on different types of proteins and develop ‘base datasets’ that help our models learn properties of proteins that benefit all our customers,” says van Grieken. “I’m doing it,” he said. You also need to regularly train and fine-tune your models on these datasets themselves.
The $73 million round, led by IVP and with participation from Index Ventures and Kindred Capital, will be used to build out the wet lab and hire across all locations.
“Our goal is now to get Cradle’s software into the hands of one million scientists,” van Grieken said in a press release.
