Cradle

Cradle Bio B.V. is a Dutch-Swiss biotechnology company that provides a software platform using generative artificial intelligence for protein engineering. Founded in May 2021, the company has headquarters in Amsterdam and an office in Zurich. The founding team includes CEO Stef van Grieken, a former product manager at Google AI and Google X; Jelle Prins, who was an early employee at Uber; Elise de Reus, previously at Zymergen; Eli Bixby from Google Brain; and Harmen van Rossum, who manages the company's wet lab. Their collective background merges expertise in machine learning, software design, and biology. Cradle's core offering is a web-based platform that enables scientists at pharmaceutical, biotech, and industrial companies to accelerate the research and development of protein-based products. The company operates on a software-as-a-service (SaaS) business model, charging a subscription fee for access to its platform. This model allows clients to retain full ownership of their intellectual property without royalty obligations. The platform is utilized across various sectors, including therapeutics, agriculture, food ingredients, and chemicals. Notable clients include Johnson & Johnson, Novo Nordisk, and eight of the top 25 global biopharma companies. The technology applies large language models to biological data, allowing scientists to upload a protein's amino acid sequence and define objectives such as improved stability or binding affinity. The AI then generates and predicts the performance of numerous protein variants, helping researchers select the most promising candidates for lab testing. This iterative process, which feeds experimental results back into the system to refine subsequent designs, can reportedly speed up R&D timelines by a factor of 2 to 12. Cradle maintains its own wet lab in Amsterdam to continuously test, validate, and improve its AI models with proprietary experimental data. Cradle has secured significant funding to support its growth. After a –5.5 million seed round in November 2022, the company raised a $24 million Series A in November 2023, both led by Index Ventures. This was followed by a $73 million Series B round in 2024, led by IVP, bringing the company's total funding to over $100 million. The capital is being used to expand its team, enhance its lab capabilities, and scale commercial operations globally. Keywords: protein engineering, generative AI, biotechnology, machine learning, synthetic biology, drug discovery, large language models, bioinformatics, protein design, AI platform, chemoproteomics, antibody engineering, enzyme optimization, therapeutics, biologics, R&D acceleration, life sciences software, computational biology, AI-driven biology, biopharma, agritech, foodtech, protein stability, lead optimization, sequence design