Press release: We've raised $5.5M to design protein-machines and cell-factories with AI - Cradle
Summary
Press release: Weve raised $5.5M to design protein-machines and cell-factories with AIBiotech startup Cradle exits stealth, raises $5.5M to design protein-machines and cell-factories with AI Cradles design platform makes it easy for everyone to start building products with biology instead of oil or animals, leveraging generative machine learning models to transform how biologists design and optimize proteins Synthetic biology can generate environmentally friendly alternatives to 60% of everything humans consume - including food, clothing, materials, medicines and chemicals Cradle emerges from stealth with seed funding round led by Index Ventures, Kindred Capital and high profile angel investorsCradle, the platform that helps scientists to design and program proteins, today announces it is exiting stealth and has raised 5.5 million ($5.4m) in seed funding, co-led by Index Ventures and Kindred Capital. Leading angel investors also participated in the round including Feike Sijbesma, Honorary Chairman and former CEO of Royal DSM; and Emily Leproust, founder of Twist Bioscience.Synthetic biology involves adapting the genes of microorganisms such as bacteria and fungi to create cell factories that use programmable proteins to produce a wide variety of everyday products: from milk and meat, grown without farming animals, to plastics created without petrochemicals, materials for clothing or electronic components, or even personalized medicines. This news comes at a time when the synthetic biology is at a commercial and scientific turning point, with Cradle primed to shape this emerging field.This production method could dramatically reduce the environmental impact of human consumption. Cradles self-teaching, self-improving generative machine learning models which draw on recent advances in natural language processing can predict which parts of a proteins genetic code a biologist will need to alter, significantly improving a scientists chances of getting the experimental results they want.Cradle further improves the performance of these large models on specific tasks relevant to the context of biological research, and makes them accessible to scientists without a machine learning background through an intuitive and collaborative online platform. Through this method, Cradle believes it can reduce the time and cost of getting a synthetic biology product to market by an order of magnitude.The company will use its seed funding to continue to accelerate product development and build out its offering as the global leader in programmable biology, scale its world class team and support the onboarding of more design partners.Sofia Dolfe, the partner who co-led the investment for Index Ventures commented:Cradles operations include a wet lab, which allows the company to generate data to train their machine learning models.