The startup plans to monetize through licensing fees, partnerships, and revenue-sharing agreements. It aims to collaborate with pharmaceutical companies to integrate its ESM3 model into their drug design processes, or share revenue with research teams that make significant discoveries using its models. The company has already used ESM3 to create a new type of green fluorescent protein, which would have taken up to 500 million years to evolve naturally. The funding will be used to train the next generation of its ESM3 model and expand its partnerships in the biotech industry.
Key takeaways:
- EvolutionaryScale Inc., an AI startup focused on biology, has raised $142 million in seed funding to accelerate the discovery of proteins for scientific research.
- The startup has developed the first large language model for the design and creation of new proteins and biological systems, which could speed up drug discovery and other applications.
- EvolutionaryScale's ESM3 LLMs have been trained on a dataset of more than 2.78 billion proteins and can design entirely new ones, with the largest version available for commercial use on its cloud-hosted Forge platform.
- Despite the potential benefits, experts have warned that these types of biological LLMs could be used to create deadly bioweapons based on novel pathogens and toxins.