The round was led by Index Ventures, with participation from Kindred Capital, bringing the company’s total raised to date to $33 million.
The company plans to use the funding to accelerate its growth, expand its machine learning and biotech teams, and continue to invest in its product development and sales capabilities.
Since emerging from stealth in 2022, Cradle has collaborated with nine industry partners, including Johnson & Johnson Innovation, Novozymes and Twist Bioscience.
The company’s platform applies generative AI and machine learning to the protein design process to accelerate biotech research and development.
The company is currently engaged in over a dozen research and development projects focused on the design of a broad range of protein modalities, including enzymes, vaccines, peptides and antibodies across a broad range of protein properties.
“Biological products are one of the greatest tools we can deploy to improve health and reduce the environmental impact of human consumption,” said Steph van Grieken, CEO and co-founder of Cradle. “Enabling biologists to design and optimize proteins more quickly and efficiently using generative AI and machine learning will help R&D teams innovate faster, reduce costs, and ultimately be more successful in developing new products.”
“Over the last year, we’ve been focused on demonstrating that our technology can drive meaningful results and initiating partnerships with a number of true industry leaders. We’re excited about the progress we’ve made to date and are pleased to have closed our Series A, giving us everything we need to build on this momentum, accelerate our growth, and welcome more customers onto our platform.”
Cradle says its technology can reduce the time and cost of developing protein-based products, with most projects moving forward twice as fast using its platform compared to the standard research and development process.
Research and development of biological products has historically been a costly and time-consuming process: for example, biopharmaceutical companies spend an average of $22 million and 42 months on research and development to prepare a single potential product for clinical trials, yet only about 35% of programs progress to clinical trials.
Cradle said its progress in raising funds demonstrates the company’s ability to provide a cost-effective solution for scientists to design proteins.
The biotech company plans to expand its team in 2024 and build further lab and engineering facilities in Amsterdam.
Sophia Dolphe, Partner at Index Ventures, commented: “The application of AI in biology will be transformative and help solve some of our biggest health and climate challenges.”
“Early results from projects conducted by some of the world’s largest R&D budgets show that Cradle’s technology is already dramatically accelerating the pace of innovation in areas that are transforming how many of the things we consume are produced.
“The team continues to rapidly expand the platform’s capabilities to meet significant customer demand. It’s exciting to see how scientists are leveraging Cradle to design new proteins and advance this emerging field of programming biology.”
