In a significant stride for synthetic biology, Cradle Bio has announced a $73 million Series B funding round led by IVP, bringing the company's total funding to over $100 million. This impressive raise comes as Cradle continues to transform protein engineering through its AI-powered platform, promising to reshape industries from therapeutics to agriculture.

I spoke with Cradle's CEO and co-founder, Stef van Grieken, ahead of the Series B announcement to dig into how the company has achieved such remarkable growth in this challenging investment climate.

Accelerating Protein Engineering Across Industries

"Across the major markets we operate in—therapeutics, diagnostics, agriculture, chemicals, and food—we're seeing between 1.2x to 12x speedups in R&D," shares van Grieken. "We're reducing the number of experimental cycles required to get to where people want to be to commercialize a protein."

This acceleration is no small feat. Traditional methods of protein engineering are notoriously slow, expensive, and unreliable. Cradle's generative AI platform is changing the game by significantly reducing development timelines and costs. The platform's unique approach allows it to dramatically reduce the number of experimental rounds needed, making the process more efficient and accessible.

From Two Customers to Industry Leaders

When Cradle secured its Series A funding, it had just two paying customers. Fast forward to today, and the company boasts 21 customers, with 31 molecules currently being developed on its platform. Notably, four out of the top 10 global pharmaceutical companies, including Johnson & Johnson and Novo Nordisk, are now clients.

"We just announced a large partnership with Novo Nordisk and Ginkgo Bioworks. We've grown our customer base substantially, and we're seeing pretty good traction with some of the largest industry leaders," van Grieken highlights.

Cradle's platform has also proven its mettle in competitive settings. In the Align to Innovate competition, their models for enzyme problems outperformed or ranked in the top two among 30 teams from industry and academia. "That was all done in an automated fashion," van Grieken notes. "No PhDs were harmed in the process."

Investing in Data and Talent

One of the keys to Cradle's success lies in its early investment in its wet lab. "From day one, we started building our own labs," van Grieken explains. "You can't be a pure computational business in biology. It's like being a self-driving car company without cars."

This hands-on approach has enabled Cradle to generate proprietary datasets, which are crucial for training their AI models. "The big problem in our space isn't foundational models; it's foundational datasets," van Grieken says. "Computers love data, especially when it helps them learn about a broad set of proteins and how they behave."

To further strengthen their position, Cradle recently appointed life sciences industry veteran Sam Partovi as Chief Commercial Officer. Partovi previously built the commercial team at Benchling and held leadership roles at Veeva Systems. "We're going to scale our commercial operation," van Grieken says. "We've hired our first few people in the U.S., so we're now expanding globally."

Ensuring Data Privacy and Ethical AI Use

With great power comes great responsibility, especially when handling sensitive data from industry giants. I asked van Grieken about how Cradle manages data privacy and intellectual property concerns.

"We train a base model that works quite well out of the box, but customers can improve it with data from their own experimental cycles," he explains. "That always happens in isolation for an individual customer. We never cross the organizational boundary."

This commitment to data security ensures that clients retain all intellectual property rights for proteins engineered on Cradle’s platform, with strict security controls over their data.

Regarding the environmental impact of AI, van Grieken acknowledges the concerns but offers a reassuring perspective. "The workloads in our industry are a lot smaller compared to human language models like ChatGPT," he says. "We're using energy to help companies move away from hydrocarbons. The environmental impact we're having through those products getting to market faster is more important than the energy savings."

Looking Ahead: A Bright Future for AI in Biology

Despite a cooling investment climate in some sectors, van Grieken remains optimistic about the future. "Long term, I'm very bullish on protein-based products," he affirms. "If we continue to see 1.2x to 12x speedups in development cycles, and people actually hitting those results for dramatically less money, that's great. A lot more very smart people are going to try to build all kinds of awesome enzymes to move away from hydrocarbons and solve other things I can't even imagine right now."

The new funding will enable Cradle to expand its wet lab capabilities, generate additional datasets, and enhance its AI models to tackle a growing array of challenges. The company plans to expand its engineering, AI research, sales, and operations teams to onboard more customers and scale the business.

"Our goal is now to put Cradle's software into the hands of a million scientists and empower them to build great products," van Grieken says. "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."

Alex Lim, General Partner at IVP, echoed this enthusiasm in the press release: "Biology is one of the domains where generative AI can have the biggest positive impact, and Cradle is leading the way with its pioneering approach to protein design as a digital service."

As I wrapped up my conversation with van Grieken, it was clear that Cradle Bio is not just riding the wave of AI innovation. With its cutting-edge technology, strategic partnerships, and a vision for a more sustainable world, Cradle is a company to watch in the coming years.