Artificial intelligence is profoundly changing the way research is conducted in the field of biotechnology. Cradle, a company dedicated to using AI to accelerate biotechnology research, recently announced the completion of $73 million in financing, marking an important step in the application of AI in biotechnology. The editor of Downcodes will give you an in-depth understanding of Cradle, its innovative AI-driven protein research methods, and its future development plans.
In the field of biotechnology, using artificial intelligence to accelerate research has become a new normal. Recently, biotechnology company Cradle announced the completion of US$73 million in financing and plans to further expand its laboratory and team. Cradle was established in 2022 and is dedicated to exploring the application of language models in biotechnology. Founder and CEO Stef van Grieken once vividly called the combination of amino acids and bases an "alien programming language," although this language AI model can also be parsed to a certain extent.
Picture source note: The picture is generated by AI, and the picture is authorized by the service provider Midjourney
Cradle's goal is to use AI technology to accelerate the testing of large molecules, such as proteins. Proteins have countless uses in medicine and industry, and the company helps clients achieve their goals by finding and recommending sequences that influence protein properties. For example, when developing a useful protein, if you want it to be more stable at high temperatures, the model looks for sequences that break down easily at high temperatures and recommends alternatives that won't affect its function.
In 2023, Cradle successfully completed a $24 million Series A financing and continues to serve customers in the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries. Van Grieken said customers generally value the speedup and cost savings gained from reducing the number of experiments. He noted that companies developing antibody treatments or detergent enzymes often need to conduct dozens of rounds of experiments to improve the effectiveness, safety and manufacturability of the protein. These experiments can cost hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars and require a lot of time and resources, and the application of AI can effectively reduce these uncertainties.
Cradle is popular with customers because it adopts a simple software-as-a-service (SaaS) business model that avoids royalties, revenue sharing or intellectual property issues. Van Grieken mentioned that competitors in the current market are mainly divided into two categories: one is companies that jointly develop drugs or processes through close cooperation, while Cradle focuses on providing software services. Van Grieken believes that AI in drug discovery and development will eventually become a general technology that any team should be able to use.
Although Cradle's main business is software, it is still a biotech company. Van Grieken said that they have a laboratory in Amsterdam dedicated to A/B testing of different types of proteins and developing "basic data sets" to help the model learn the properties of proteins, thereby benefiting all customers. In addition, they need to regularly train and tune models on these data sets.
The financing was led by IVP, with participation from Index Ventures and Kindred Capital, and the funds will be used to expand the laboratory and recruit new talents. "Our goal is to put Cradle's software into the hands of one million scientists," Van Grieken said in a press release.
Cradle's successful financing and its commitment to applying AI technology to biotechnology research indicate that AI has great potential for future development in the field of biomedicine. We look forward to Cradle bringing more innovations and breakthroughs to the biotechnology field in the future.