Latent Labs, a biotech company founded by former Google DeepMind scientist, recently announced it has received $50 million in financing, officially entering the public eye. The company is committed to using basic AI models to innovate protein design with the goal of making biological research more efficient and automated. Its core technology is based on DeepMind's AlphaFold model and is developed and applied more deeply on this basis. It aims to cooperate with biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies to jointly promote the drug R&D process and reduce R&D risks and costs.
In the biotechnology field, new startup Latent Labs is moving from a secret phase to the public eye with a $50 million financing. Founded by former Google DeepMind scientist Simon Kohl, the company aims to leverage the basic models of artificial intelligence to “make biology programmable” and work with biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies to generate and optimize proteins.
To understand the mission of Latent Labs, we must first recognize the key role of proteins in biology. Proteins are the basis for driving everything in living cells, and their structure determines their function. However, traditionally, determining the three-dimensional structure of a protein is a slow and laborious process. DeepMind's breakthrough AlphaFold successfully predicted the structure of about 200 million proteins by combining machine learning with real biological data. This progress provides scientists with better tools to understand diseases, design new drugs, and even create entirely new synthetic proteins.
Simon Kohl, the founder of Latent Labs, was a research scientist at DeepMind and participated in the core team of AlphaFold2. At the end of 2022, he realized that there was still a lot of untapped potential in the field of protein design, and decided to independently start Latent Labs, focusing on developing cutting-edge protein design models.
Currently, Latent Labs has about 15 employees, including members from DeepMind. The company is headquartered in London and also has laboratories in San Francisco. This dual layout allows Latent Labs to test its models in a real environment and obtain the necessary feedback to ensure technological advancements.
Kohl said Latent Labs’ ultimate goal is to reduce reliance on traditional laboratory experiments and make biology research more efficient and automated. He envisions an ideal state: when scientists propose hypotheses about drug targets for specific diseases, Latent Labs' model is able to "press a button" to generate protein drugs with all the ideal properties.
In terms of business model, Latent Labs does not plan to develop its own medicine, but instead hopes to accelerate and reduce risks in the early stage of R&D through cooperation with third parties. Kohl believes that working with biopharmaceuticals and life science companies can maximize Latent Labs’ influence.
The $50 million financing includes a $10 million seed round and a $40 million Series A investment, with major investors including Radical Ventures and Sofinnova Partners. The funds obtained will be mainly used to expand teams and infrastructure, especially the construction of computing power, to support the development of large-scale models.
As more and more startups and tech giants focus on the computationalization of biotech, Kohl believes that this field is still in its early stages and there is still a lot of room for innovation in the future.
Latent Labs' $50 million financing heralds a new wave of development in the field of artificial intelligence-driven biotechnology. Its development is worth looking forward to. In the future, it may truly achieve "programmability" of biology, thereby accelerating the research and development of new drugs and benefiting human health.