Catching up with Cradle's co-founder Stef van Grieken

What if we could decode the language of life? In our conversation marking the Series B investment, CEO Stef van Grieken talks about how AI-powered protein engineering can help solve some of our planet’s biggest challenges.

The life sciences is having its industrial revolution moment. Cradle focuses on proteins, the molecular machines responsible for making everything from food to life-saving medicines and construction materials. Until recently, protein engineering has been something of an artisanal craft. It’s highly skilled but painfully slow, often taking many years and tens of millions of dollars, with no promise of a meaningful result at the end. As Stef puts it, while we’re at ChatGPT 4.0 in the world of AI, we’re Biology 0.5 in our ability to understand and manipulate the language of life.

But that’s changing. The recent Nobel Prize awarded to AlphaFold researchers shows how AI is transforming how to visualize protein structures in 3D, giving us CAD models for biology. Now Cradle goes a step further. Before understanding how proteins fold, you need to grasp what they can do and what happens when you modify them. Cradle leverages AI to help scientists learn not just from what worked, but to discover possibilities based on all the experiments that didn’t. This holds out the promise of better drugs, more sustainable materials and animal-free food – all discovered more cheaply and quicker than with traditional methods.

We first met Stef in November 2021, just weeks after they’d incorporated. We saw a team that wasn’t just building a company, but defining a category and pioneering a totally new way of working with the building blocks of life. By the end of the month, we’d closed the seed round; the next year we led the Series A, and now we’re thrilled to participate in Cradle’s $73 million Series B.

Congratulations to Stef and the the entire team at Cradle – we’re excited to be your partners as you expand the boundaries of what biology can do.