Today we're excited to announce that we've raised $73 million in Series B funding led by IVP, with continued backing from Index Ventures and Kindred Capital. This brings our total funding to over $100 million – a major step toward our goal of bringing AI-powered protein engineering to every lab around the world.

We believe it’s crucial for the world to get really good at engineering proteins to improve human and planetary health. They are extremely versatile and enable us to do things we couldn’t do before – from enabling new therapeutics that treat diseases to producing sustainable materials, animal-free foods, eco-friendly pesticides and oil-free chemicals. The ability to engineer proteins has the power to reshape our world.

The challenge in protein engineering has been clear: developing new protein based products through traditional methods is time-intensive, costly and error-prone. It’s like searching for a needle in a haystack. Scientists often spend years running experiments, using millions of dollars in resources, with no guarantee of success. We started Cradle because we believed AI could play a meaningful role in solving this challenge, and we're excited to see this vision becoming a reality.

Our platform enables scientists to leverage generative AI models with experimental data to engineer promising protein sequences. Using continuous learning from experimental results, our models become increasingly adept at engineering sequences that achieve desired properties and functions. 

We have been very excited about the impact our platform has had for our customers. We are seeing significant speed up in research and development projects, between 1.2 and 12x, with cost reductions of up to 90%. Scientists love using Cradle to engineer proteins, consistently giving our platform a 8+ satisfaction score. Since we started commercializing our software platform earlier in the year we grew our customer base to over 21 customers with 31 proteins being developed. Our models perform amazingly well in benchmarks. And we are proud that some of the best companies in the industry such as Novo Nordisk, Johnson & Johnson Innovative Medicine, Novonesis and Grifols use Cradle today.

With the new funding we want to bring Cradle to more labs around the world. The new funding will help us accelerate three key areas:

• Expanding our wet lab to further research into additional protein modalities and properties to improve our foundational models

• Growing our engineering team to tackle more complex protein engineering challenges

• Scaling our go-to-market and operations to bring our platform to more scientific teams

  
  

Sam Partovi recently joined as Chief Commercial Officer, bringing valuable experience in scaling life science platforms. As our 40th team member, his arrival couldn't come at a better time as we push to expand our impact.

As Alex Lim, General Partner at IVP, our new investor put it:

“Biology is one of the domains where generative AI can have the biggest positive impact and Cradle is leading the way with its pioneering approach to protein design as a digital service. Given the costs associated with drug discovery or similar fields of research, any efficiencies at the R&D stage will translate to both major financial returns for customers and significant real-world benefits for humanity. With impressive results delivered by Cradle’s platform just two years after launch, we see a bright future ahead for one of Europe’s - and the world’s - most consequential AI companies.” 

We're grateful for the trust Alex and the IVP team has placed in us, and the continued support from Carlos & Sofia at Index Ventures, and Leila at Kindred Capital. If you're excited about using AI to accelerate scientific discovery, we'd love to hear from you – whether as a customer, partner, or future team member.

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Download full press release here