Cradle, a biotech startup harnessing the power of artificial intelligence (AI) for protein design, has raised $73 million in funding to accelerate its mission of revolutionizing the biotech industry. The company, founded in 2022, has been gaining traction with its innovative approach to protein design, which leverages language models to accelerate testing and recommendation of desirable protein sequences.

The company's founder and CEO, Stef van Grieken, has referred to the strings of amino acids and bases as "an alien programming language," but one that an AI model can still parse to some extent. Cradle's approach focuses on accelerating the testing of large biomolecules like proteins, which serve countless purposes in medicine and industry, by identifying and recommending sequences that affect desirable qualities. For instance, if a company wants to make a protein more resistant to heat, the model looks for sequences that tend to break down at warmer temperatures and offers alternatives that won't change its functions otherwise.

After securing a $24 million A round in 2023, Cradle has been serving customers in the biotech and pharma spaces, providing them with accelerated testing and cost savings. According to van Grieken, companies value the acceleration and cost savings that come with having to do fewer experimental runs to get the molecule where they want it. Experimental rounds can cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars and take a significant amount of time, making Cradle's AI-driven approach an attractive solution.

The company's business model is based on a simple SaaS (Software as a Service) approach, which has proven popular among customers. This model eliminates the need to worry about royalties, revenue share, or IP issues, making it an appealing option for biotech and pharma companies. Van Grieken notes that competition in the space is split into two groups: those doing close partnerships to co-develop a drug or process, and those, like Cradle, strictly providing a software service.

Despite being a software company, Cradle still operates as a biotech company, with a laboratory in Amsterdam where they conduct A/B testing on various proteins and develop "Foundational Datasets" that help models learn properties of proteins that benefit all customers. The company regularly trains and fine-tunes models from these datasets themselves, ensuring continuous improvement.

The $73 million round, led by IVP, with Index Ventures and Kindred Capital participating, will be used to build out the wet lab and expand the team. Van Grieken's ambitious goal is to put Cradle's software into the hands of a million scientists, further solidifying the company's position as a leader in AI-driven biotech.

The investment is a testament to the growing recognition of AI's potential to transform the biotech industry. As the industry continues to evolve, companies like Cradle are poised to play a significant role in shaping the future of biotech and medicine. With its innovative approach and expanding capabilities, Cradle is well-positioned to make a meaningful impact in the years to come.