CradleTranslation site

Cradle is a biotech company focused on helping scientists design and engineer proteins using Generative AI technology.

Company Overview

• Established: Cradle was founded in 2021 and is headquartered in Delft, the Netherlands, with an office in Zurich, Switzerland.
• Team Size: As of the most recent information, the Cradle team has expanded to 20 people, located in both the Netherlands and Switzerland.
• Founder and Core Team: Cradle's Founder and CEO is Stef van Grieken, who has extensive experience in machine learning and protein engineering, having led product development at Google's Brain division. The CTO is Daniel Danciu and the team also includes experts from leading technology and biotech companies.

Business & Products

Cradle's core product is a platform that uses generative AI to help scientists design and engineer proteins. The platform builds a powerful generative AI model that accelerates the protein design and optimization process by training billions of protein sequences as well as data generated in its own lab. Specific features and functionality include:

• Improve protein stability: Cradle's model excels in improving protein stability, outperforming other models in the industry by 20%.
• fast output: Output speeds are twice as fast as industry benchmarks, enabling significant reductions in R&D cycles.
• Multi-disciplinary applications: Cradle's technology can be applied to the design of a wide range of proteins such as enzymes, vaccines, peptides and antibodies, covering the required attributes such as stability, expression, activity, binding affinity and specificity.
• Intuitive and easy-to-use platform: Cradle builds a web-based software platform that can be used by any team of scientists and experimenters without the help of bioinformaticians or machine learning engineers.

Financing

Cradle has achieved significant results in financing, providing solid financial support for its technology development and market expansion:

• seed round: In 2022, Cradle secured a €5.5 million seed round co-led by Index Ventures and Kindred Capital, followed by angel investors.
• Series A financing: On November 28, 2023, Cradle announced a $24 million Series A financing round, bringing the total to $33 million, led by Index Ventures with participation from Kindred Capital and also including Recursion co-founder and CEO Chris Gibson and Thomson Kindred Capital, as well as angel investors including Chris Gibson, co-founder and CEO of Recursion, and Tom Glocer, former CEO of Reuters and lead director of Merck & Co.

Markets and Cooperation

Cradle has established partnerships with several industry leaders, including Johnson & Johnson Innovation, Novozymes and Twist Bioscience. These partnerships not only validate the market value of Cradle's technology, but also provide strong support for further market expansion.

future development

Cradle is in a rapid growth phase and plans to continue to expand its team, add research capabilities, and invest in product development and sales capabilities in the future. The company also plans to build additional labs and engineering facilities in Amsterdam to help increase research capabilities and generate more data that can be used to further train and optimize its AI models.

Competitive advantages

• technological lead: Cradle's generative AI technology offers significant advantages in the areas of protein design and engineering, and can dramatically improve R&D efficiency and success.
• Multi-disciplinary applications: Cradle's technology can be applied to a wide range of fields, including biopharmaceuticals, food and materials science, and has broad market potential.
• Strong team: Cradle's core team consists of experts from top technology and biotech companies with extensive industry experience and expertise.

Cradle is an innovative and leading-edge technology company in the biotechnology space, and its solution to help scientists design and engineer proteins using generative AI technology is incrementally changing the way research and development is done in biopharmaceuticals and other related industries.