Proteins are at the core of many products, from pharmaceuticals to food. However, traditional research methods for engineering better proteins have been slow, expensive, and unreliable. It can take years and many millions of dollars to run a successful R&D process and many projects are never completed successfully because they cannot achieve their targets.
Cradle's AI platform enables scientists to accelerate the discovery and development of improved proteins by making the process of engineering better proteins significantly easier, faster, and more cost-effective. The key to Cradle's success lies in its AI platform’s unique approach, which allows it to dramatically reduce the number of experimental rounds needed.
Cradle has experienced rapid growth, and is now in commercial deployment across a wide range of industries. In the last year, Cradle has significantly expanded its customer base and impact, signing new partnerships with Novo Nordisk and Ginkgo Bioworks and growing its customer base to include pharmaceuticals, chemicals, food, agriculture, and materials.
The Series B funding will partly be used to expand Cradle’s own wet lab to generate additional datasets that will be used to train Cradle’s models to address a growing array of challenges and modalities. Cradle will also expand its engineering team to further improve Cradle's ML capabilities to better generalise across tasks and handle more complex proteins. The round was led by IVP with participation from previous investors Index Ventures and Kindred Capital.
Cradle is headquartered in Amsterdam with an affiliate in the Canton of Zurich. CEO Stef van Grieken and a part of the team is based in Zurich. “Over the past two years, our own research and our collaborations with partners have proven that this technology can deliver remarkable results across a range of applications, from developing new vaccines and sustainable chemicals, to novel diagnostics and agricultural crop protection. Our goal is now to put Cradle’s software into the hands of a million scientists and empower them to build great products. Our Series B will make this next phase of growth possible and we’re delighted to have the backing of IVP to help us scale”, said Stef von Grieken.
(Press release / SK)