Cradle's technology is not limited to drug development and could also be used in food and industrial applications. The company plans to use the new capital to expand its team and sales. The funding round was led by previous investor Index Ventures, with participation from Kindred Capital and individual investors Chris Gibson, Tom Glocer, among others.
Key takeaways:
- Biotech and AI startup Cradle has raised $24 million in new investment for its generative approach to protein design, which uses AI to understand and work with the long sequences of amino acids that make up proteins.
- The company's technology has attracted major drug development companies like Johnson & Johnson and Novozymes, as it can significantly reduce the time and number of experiments required to create a useful and functional protein from scratch.
- Cradle's technology is not limited to drug development and can also be used in food and industrial applications. It does not require a machine learning engineer to operate and can be used directly by scientists and labs.
- Cradle CEO and co-founder Stef van Grieken believes that while fundraising for a deep-tech venture is more complicated in Europe than in the US, Europe is underappreciated from a talent perspective, with a large pool of engineers and some of the best universities for computer science and molecular biology in the world.