NEW YORK – Startup Latent Labs this week exited stealth mode by announcing $50 million in funding to pursue generative artificial intelligence (AI) methods for designing proteins from scratch.
The company, which is registered in Delaware and has offices in London and San Francisco, is developing a bioinformatic platform to enable researchers to computationally design bespoke therapeutic proteins. The firm expects its technology to help lower drug development timelines while increasing their chances of success.
The firm's financing includes $40 million in Series A funding led by Radical Ventures and Sofinnova Partners, with participation from Flying Fish, Isomer, 8VC, Kindred Capital, and Pillar VC. Additional angel investors include Google chief scientist Jeff Dean, Transformer architecture inventor and Cohere Founder Aidan Gomez, and ElevenLabs Founder Mati Staniszewski.
"We've partnered with Latent Labs because we're confident that this team will realize the therapeutic and commercial potential of de novo protein design," Aaron Rosenberg, partner at Radical Ventures, said in a statement.
"We push the frontiers of generative biology," said Latent Labs CEO Simon Kohl, "giving our partners instant access to tools that accelerate their drug design programs." Kohl previously co-led DeepMind's protein design team and was a senior research scientist on DeepMind's AlphaFold2 initiative.