Biotechnology company Cradle announced the completion of US$73 million in financing, which will be used to expand its laboratory and team to further promote the application of artificial intelligence in protein design. Founded in 2022, Cradle is committed to using AI technology to accelerate macromolecule testing, reduce R&D costs and improve efficiency in the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries. Its core technology is to use AI models to predict and recommend sequences that affect protein properties, helping customers optimize protein design, reduce the number of experiments and costs, and thereby accelerate the development of new drugs and new materials. Cradle adopts a simple SaaS business model and avoids complex intellectual property issues, and has been widely welcomed by customers.
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.
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 they have a lab in Amsterdam dedicated to A/B testing different types of proteins and developing "basic data sets" to help models 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.
Highlight:
Cradle has completed US$73 million in financing and plans to expand its laboratory and team to accelerate protein design.
The company provides services to the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries through AI technology, helping to reduce the number of experiments and costs.
Adopt a simple SaaS business model to avoid complex issues such as royalties, and strive to popularize AI technology to more scientists.
All in all, Cradle's financing success and its application of AI technology in the field of biotechnology indicate that future biomedical research and development will accelerate into a new era of more efficiency and lower cost. This will not only benefit biotechnology companies, but will ultimately benefit all mankind.