Protein design company Profluent announced it raised $35 million in funding led by Spark Capital. Existing investors Insight Partners and Air Street Capital participated, along with a syndicate of angel investors from OpenAI, Salesforce, Octant Bio, and Google, including Jeff Dean, the Chief Scientist of Google DeepMind. The company raised $9 million from Insight Partners, Air Street Capital, AIX Ventures, and Convergent Ventures.
Profluent was founded on the basis that AI could be used to decode life’s language and surpass the engineering limits of traditional proteins. Previous approaches used inefficient searches within nature or brute-force mutagenesis, thus hampering successful results. Profluent’s models can rapidly access an immense combinatorial space to optimize across multiple functional attributes, enabling a shift from accidental discovery to intentional design. The platform’s versatility enables AI to tune existing CRISPR scaffolds or create novel editing systems from the ground up to craft the right tool for each patient.
Spark Capital general partners Fraser Kelton and Nabeel Hyatt will join the company’s Board of Directors in connection with the funding. The funding will support Profluent’s next growth stage, focusing on advancing its proprietary LLMs and datasets, wet lab capabilities, and up-leveling of CRISPR gene editing. This funding will also enable the creation and validation of functional proteins and move the company closer to significantly improving healthcare and disease treatment.
Profluent was co-founded in 2022 by Ali Madani (who previously led machine learning research initiatives at Salesforce Research) and Alexander Meeske (an assistant professor of microbiology at the University of Washington’s School of Medicine).
Profluent’s seasoned executive team also includes Chief Business Officer Hilary Eaton, who brings a decade of gene editing-focused business development experience at Tome, Vor, and Editas. And VP and Head of Gene Editing Peter Cameron previously directed technology development at Spotlight and Caribou.
KEY QUOTES:
“Our research at the forefront of AI has enabled Profluent to create large language models that begin to learn the blueprint of nature. We are moving biology from being constrained by what can be discovered in nature to being able to design precisely according to our needs via AI. The science is real, and the time is now to proactively create breakthrough medicines that can transform society.”
– Ali Madani, Profluent co-founder and Chief Executive Officer
“As they advance the frontier of AI research in the life sciences, Ali and Profluent are making biology programmable for the first time. I joined OpenAI in 2020 when I realized the events of this past year were inevitable. We’re at the precipice of a similar change in biology. Just as ChatGPT can write compelling essays and emails, Profluent has developed AI that designs entirely new and functional proteins. Having seen firsthand what happens when the frontier of AI is advanced in a field, it was impossible to not be involved with Profluent and support their mission.”
– Fraser Kelton, General Partner at Spark Capital and former Head of Product at OpenAI
“Historically, true disruption has occurred when two cutting-edge technologies intersect. Profluent is bridging AI and CRISPR, leading to previously unseen innovation in the field. We view the transformation of natural enzymes like Cas9 into therapeutics as a significant leap forward, and we intend to build on this progress by custom-designing enzymes for entirely new editing modalities. The foundation of our business model is partnerships – we’re actively evaluating potential collaborations with companies that are correspondingly best-in-class or innovative within each therapeutic vertical, CRISPR and beyond.”
– Hilary Eaton, Chief Business Officer at Profluent
