[Funding alert] Amsterdam-based Biotech Startup Cradle Secures $24M in Series A Round Funding
Nov 29, 2023 | By Team SR
Amsterdam-based biotech startup Cradle secures $24M in series A round funding. The firm builds simple to use web-based software that any team of scientists and experimentalists can employ without help from a bioinformatician or machine learning engineer, using generative AI to help scientists design and engineer proteins.
Kindred Capital is involved in the funding, which is led by Index Ventures. Prominent angel investors, such as Tom Glocer, a former CEO of Thomson Reuters and Lead Director at Merck, and Chris Gibson, co-founder and CEO of Recursion, also took part in the round.
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With the funds, Cradle plans to grow even faster, hire more people in machine learning and biotech, and keep putting funds into its product development and sales departments.
By assisting in the elimination of conventional data barriers, the programme enables biotechnology businesses to offer their data for use with Generative AI and ML tools, which will expedite R&D pipelines.
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Stef van Grieken, Cradle's CEO and co-founder, commented: "Biological products are one of the biggest tools we can deploy to improve health outcomes and reduce the environmental impact of human consumption. By using generative AI and machine learning to help biologists design and optimise proteins faster and more efficiently, we can help research and development teams innovate faster, spend less and ultimately be more successful in developing new products. In the last year we've been focused on demonstrating that our technology can deliver meaningful results and initiating partnerships with a number of true industry leaders. We're thrilled with the progress to date and are excited to have closed our Series A, which gives us everything we need to build on this momentum, accelerate our growth and onboard more customers to our platform."
Index Ventures Partners Sofia Dolfe commented: "The application of AI in biology will be transformational, helping to solve some of the biggest health and climate challenges. The early results, from projects run by companies with some of the largest R&D budgets globally, indicate that Cradle's technology is already dramatically accelerating the pace of innovation in a field that will reshape how we produce much of what we consume. The team has continued to rapidly expand the capabilities of its platform to meet significant customer demand. It's exciting to see how scientists leverage Cradle to design new proteins and advance this emerging field of programming biology."
About Cradle
Cradle believe that hypothetically, cells might make nearly everything, include clothes, food, fuel, and medications. Cell manufacturing design is a challenging task, but their tools and machine learning models can help. Their ultimate goal is to contribute to the transition from traditional agriculture and industry to a more sustainable global economy.
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