Cradle, a Delft, the Netherlands- and Zurich, Switzerland-based biotech startup that uses generative AI to help scientists design and engineer proteins, raised $24M in Series A funding.
The round, which brought the total amount to $33M, was led by Index Ventures with participation from Kindred Capital. Angel investors also participated, including Chris Gibson, co-founder and CEO of Recursion and Tom Glocer, former CEO of Thomson Reuters and Lead Director, Merck.
The company intends to use the funds to accelerate its growth, expand its machine learning and biotech team and continue to invest in its product development and sales capabilities.
Led by CEO Stef van Grieken, Cradle provides a machine learning platform that helps scientists to design proteins, speeding up the development of new therapeutics and bio-based products such as enzymes, antibodies, lab grown food and bio-based materials and chemicals.
The company has already onboarded nine industry partners in the past year including Johnson & Johnson Innovation, Novozymes, and Twist Bioscience. It is now working on more than 12 research and development projects focused on engineering a wide range of protein modalities including enzymes, vaccines, peptides and antibodies across a broad spectrum of desired protein properties, such as stability, expression, activity, binding affinity and specificity.
The Cradle team is currently 20 people, split between Delft, The Netherlands and Zurich, Switzerland, with plans to expand its team in 2024. The company also plans to build out additional laboratory and engineering facilities in Amsterdam, helping to add capacity to accelerate its research and generate more data which can be used to train AI models.
FinSMEs
28/11/2023