Cradle raised $73 million in a Series-B investment round. With this, the biotech startup aims to invest heavily in its own AI platform for, among other things, manipulating pieces of DNA for better protein (protein) sequences in customers’ products.
With the recently concluded investment round, Cradle has now managed to raise $100 million in capital so far. The latest investment round was led by major U.S. venture capital IVP. Existing shareholders in Dutch/Swiss startup Index Ventures and Kindred Capital also participated again in the round. That lineage matches Cradle’s branch locations: Switzerland (Zurich) and the Netherlands (Amsterdam)
Expansion in three areas
With the capital raised, Cradle plans to invest in three areas. First, the biotech startup wants to further expand its laboratory activities. The goal is to expand research into more protein sequences and properties. This can then be used to further improve the aforementioned AI models within its own platform.
In addition, money will go toward expanding the research team to address more complex challenges in protein development. Further investments will be made to expand go-to-market activities to bring the opportunities offered by Cradle to more sectors and scientific teams.
State of Play
Commenting on the news of the Series B round, Cradle also gave a hint of where things stand at the moment. Meanwhile, the research and development processes are moving ever faster, delivering cost savings of up to 90 percent.
Customers are said to be more than satisfied with the platform. Since commercially offering the AI platform earlier this year, the number of customers has increased to more than 21, and 31 (new) dedicated proteins have been developed in the same period. Furthermore, the in-house developed dedicated LLMs are said to perform very well in benchmarks.
Digital protein design service
Cradle’s AI platform, developed based on the Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Google TPUs and other AI tooling, helps customers accelerate research for creating new proteins. These include companies in the pharmaceutical industry, such as Novo Nordisk and Johnson & Johnson, as well as the chemical, food and agricultural sectors.
The biotech startup can use this platform to manipulate pieces of DNA to make protein-related products better for their specific purposes. This is to make them simpler, easier to store or harmless to healthy cells. Cradle is currently designing optimal enzymes, but has vaccines, peptides and antibodies available “in beta.”
Read more: Cradle makes biology programmable