EvolutionaryScale's funding round was led by Lux Capital and included prominent AI investors Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross. The startup's long-term vision involves selling a general-purpose AI model for biology that could be used in medicine and other biotech applications. However, the company acknowledges that it could take up to ten years for biology AI models to help design products and therapies.
Key takeaways:
- Former Meta researchers have raised $40 million to build new biological AI language models (LLMs) that can help develop everything from cancer-fighting programmable cells to organisms that clean up toxic waste.
- The startup, EvolutionaryScale, is led by Alexander Rives, who previously ran Meta AI’s protein-folding team. The team created a transformers-based model trained on data about protein molecules to predict the structures of other unknown proteins.
- Lux Capital led the roughly $40 million funding round for EvolutionaryScale, which valued the company at $200 million. Prominent AI investors Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross also participated in the round.
- EvolutionaryScale aims to build a new model each year and expand beyond just predicting protein structures to integrating other biological data. Its long-term vision includes selling a general purpose AI model for biology that could be used for various applications, including medicine and biotech.