Caravel Bio lands $1.25M NSF grant to scale AI protein engine
What's the deal? Caravel BioDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → has secured a $1,246,984 Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II grant from the National Science Foundation. The Portland-based company builds systems to discover, engineer, and manufacture proteins, and says fewer than 5% of applicants over the past decade win the award.
What's the endgame? Caravel's platform runs biological experiments in parallel, building and testing millions of protein designs at once. That scale generates the data its AI needs to engineer proteins "nature never built." The grant funds spore-displayed enzymes and pilots with existing customers.
Why now? Nearly every industrial enzyme, therapeutic, and biomaterial on the market uses the same 20 canonical amino acids. Hundreds more exist — Ozempic uses one non-canonical amino acid for stability — but biotech has lacked reliable ways to make products from them at scale.
The hire: Caravel has named Michał Jastrzębski, formerly of Ginkgo Bioworks, Proxima, and Intel, as chief technology officer to lead its work training AI models for biomolecular design.
The grant is non-dilutive and sits in a wider public-funding track. Caravel launched in 2025 alongside a separate $7.8 million NSF award, and has since reported a Shell GameChanger collaboration that raised an enzyme's stability 12-fold under industrial conditions.
"When an experiment costs a fraction of a cent instead of tens of dollars, you stop asking which handful of ideas might work and instead start testing all of them," said Emily Bowman, chief scientific officer of Caravel. Founder and chief executive officer Trevor Nicks said the team rebuilt biomolecular engineering "completely from scratch" to cut costs while raising speed and volume.
What could go wrong? The grant and the CTO hire strengthen Caravel's development capacity, but neither establishes commercial traction. The test is whether its high-throughput data can translate into repeatable products and paying pilots.
The signal: Protein design is drawing commercial money too: Dutch startup SilicozymeDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → raised in July for an AI-enabled manufacturing platform, and Cradle announced €22 million in October. Caravel's bet is that cheaper, massive data — the same ingredient behind AlphaFold — can push new chemistries from the lab to market.
Read more: prnewswire.com
Image credit: Caravel Bio
