Cradle

The slow, expensive, and unpredictable nature of protein engineering has often limited the biotechnology world. Unfortunately, standard trial-and-error still remains a bottleneck for drug development, sustainable materials, and food. But Cradle—an innovator in AI-driven protein design—is creating change in the field.  

Cradle's generative AI platform is being developed under the leadership of CEO Stef van Grieken, who believes users can easily design proteins with improved stability, efficiency, and manufacturability—all reducing the emphasis on whatever rounds of iterations would have been required. The firm aims to predict amino-acid sequences that match scientific goals rather than spend time and funds for experimental processes. These technologies break into the "expensive" and "much experimentation" barrier to fundamental protein engineering in R&D. With support from industry game-changers—such as CRISPR pioneer Jennifer Doudna—researchers can share whatever protein properties they hope to design, whether they are finding new microbes or creating novel kinds of proteins. The company trains its AI on knowledge from extensive data, including its own wet-lab data. This reduces the investment required by the institution, and makes the platform accessible for researchers who would normally work at elite institutions like Doudna's. There is even a second aspect to Cradle that enhances the use of their platform to facilitate innovation—across pharmaceuticals, agriculture, food, and sustainable materials. The firm also has a unique "design-test-learn" loop whereby findings from the lab are reentered into the company’s platform, and the platform accounts for them—which then becomes the data pool for offering suggestions for the next design. This enables acceleration of 2–12× and savings from research of up to 90% compared to standard approaches. The platform is used by researchers of a variety of institutions, and feedback is positively inclined. In fact, in terms of likeliness to recommend, researchers rank satisfaction "8 and up". 

Cradle has had great growth and global reach. As of the end of 2023, the firm had a 20-member team throughout the Netherlands and Switzerland. By November 2024, the company had grown to 40 employees (while hiring the company's 40th team member, Sam Partovi, as Chief Commercial Officer). Cradle has operations in Amsterdam and headquarters there that include a proprietary wet lab, and has another office in Zurich. The company also has teams in the U.S., in Boston and California, to engage with American clients. For its future scaling, the company plans to expand its laboratory and engineering space in Amsterdam, to house more training data as the company continues to scale.

A significant factor in Cradle's rapid scaling has been the funding it has achieved. The company completed a €5.5 million (~$5.4 million) seed round in November 2022, co-led by Index Ventures and Kindred Capital with angel investors, including Feike Sijbesma and Emily Leproust. In November 2023, the firm announced a $24 million Series A round, led by Index Ventures. By November 2024, the company announced a $73 million Series B round, led by IVP, who is now in this enjoyable club with continued support from Index Ventures and Kindred Capital, bringing its funding total to more than $100 million. While the company has not yet made a public announcement about its valuation (and rightly so), some outlets have published estimates valuing Cradle as high as $50 billion (but these reports have not been confirmed).

Even though there are no figures for net profit available to the public, the company is at a commercial stage with revenue growing. There are several estimates from various sources for annual revenue of between $10.2M, and $14.3M, demonstrating an active customer base and robust deal flow. The firm is currently in use with 21 corporate clients and accounts for more than 31 protein design projects in biotech, pharma, and industrial spaces. Cradle is a B2B SaaS company, which generates revenue from enterprise contracts, and custom licensing agreements with each customer in biotech, pharma, and industrial spaces. There are no conclusive disclosures of exact pricing of the firm’s owned and operated platform. It has been reported that the vast majority of Cradle's revenue is generated from subscription sales for the platform as R&D subscription use, with the option of integration (APIs), Cloud infrastructures, and experimental design. The company is committed to building collaborative offerings, where it will allow a maximum of 2 companies ( at a time) to co-develop protein engineering projects with the firm’s proprietary wet-lab data, and in return, walk away with Cradle's tangible asset at the end of the project. Bundling these types of agreements encourages the company’s platform usage whilst allowing Cradle to create a broad range of types of flexible and scalable pricing across multiple industries while also allowing the company considerable leverage in accruing deep and high recurring revenue relationships.

Even though Cradle will find a place among players in AI-driven protein engineering (such as Benson Hill, Zymergen, Genome Compiler, and Molecule.one, who operate in related areas, largely computational crop design, microbial/microbe engineering, and automated chemistry planning, respectively), the firm has unique strengths. For example, the company focuses on protein-specific design, offers an intuitive user interface, includes a proprietary feedback loop with real-world lab results, and has established an early successful customer base based on pharmaceutical or agricultural enterprises. That said, Cradle has established a design-centric, collaborative platform that has a distinct advantage, even over more conventional and code-heavy biotech solutions.

Cradle's mission, fervently driven by CEO Stef van Grieken's belief that biology is "the most powerful technology in the world," is to provide the use of this technology in a more accessible, more accurate, and more designable way. With an impressive set of financial backing, revenues growing, tremendously strong global clients, and a growing international team that is scaling up fast, the firm’s future is not only going to shift the future of biotechnology, but it is going to reshape it. Much like Cleo redefined personal finance with AI and user experience, the company is defining a new bioengineering era—a world where designing proteins isn't just another science, but an intelligent-scalable-design process where people can work with biology far more efficiently. Cradle is literally changing not only how we work with biology, but redefining what we can and cannot do with biology.

Click here to access Cradle's website.