Profluent, a pioneering AI-first protein design firm based in Berkeley, California, has achieved a momentous milestone by securing a substantial $35 million in funding.
This funding round was led by the esteemed Spark Capital, with notable contributions from established backers such as Insight Partners and Air Street Capital. A consortium of angel investors, including luminaries from OpenAI, Salesforce, Octant Bio, and Google—Jeff Dean, Chief Scientist of Google DeepMind—also demonstrated their confidence in Profluent's potential by participating in the funding round. Fraser Kelton, former Head of Product at OpenAI, and Nabeel Hyatt, a general partner at Spark Capital, have joined the company's Board of Directors, further bolstering Profluent's leadership.
“Our research at the forefront of AI has enabled Profluent to create large language models that begin to learn the blueprint of nature,” said Ali Madani, Profluent co-founder and Chief Executive Officer. “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.”
With this capital infusion, Profluent aims to accelerate its mission of developing groundbreaking, functional proteins that have the potential to revolutionize healthcare and advance disease treatment.
Under the leadership of CEO Ali Madani, Chief Business Officer Hilary Eaton, and VP and Head of Gene Editing Peter Cameron, PhD, Profluent distinguishes itself as an industry leader in leveraging AI technology for protein design. The company's innovative approach harnesses deep generative models to conceptualize and validate novel proteins with exceptional precision. By swiftly navigating vast combinatorial spaces, Profluent's models optimize proteins across multiple functional dimensions, ushering in a new era of deliberate design in biomedicine. The company's initial focus lies in leveraging CRISPR systems to expedite the development of crucial genetic therapeutics.