Profluent, a Berkeley, CA-based AI-first protein design company, secured $35 million in funding, bringing its total raised to $44 million.
Investors
The round was led by Spark Capital, with participation from existing investors Insight Partners and Air Street Capital, and a syndicate of angel investors from OpenAI, Salesforce, Octant Bio, and Google.
Spark Capital is a venture capital firm that invests in the consumer, commerce, FinTech, software, frontier, and media sectors. Founded in 2005 and is based in San Francisco, California.
As part of the financing, Kelton and Nabeel Hyatt, also a general partner at Spark Capital, will join the company’s Board of Directors.
Profluent Use of Funds
The company will use the funding to support its next stage of growth, focusing on advancing its proprietary LLMs and datasets, enhancing wet lab capabilities, and further developing CRISPR gene editing.
About Profluent
Profluent was founded in 2022 by Ali Madani and Alexander Meeske, with the principle of utilizing AI as an interpreter to decode the language of life and transcend the limits of traditional protein engineering. Profluent is an AI-first protein design company that develops deep generative models to design and validate novel, functional proteins, aiming to revolutionize biomedicine. The company’s technology has been validated by a peer-reviewed paper in Nature Biotechnology, which detailed the first demonstration of LLMs generating entire de novo proteins that function as well as natural proteins evolved over millions of years.
Funding Details
Company: Profluent Bio, Inc.
Raised: $35.0M
Round: Unknown
Lead Investor: Spark Capital
Additional Investors: Insight Partners, Air Street Capital, a syndicate of angel investors from OpenAI, Salesforce, Octant Bio, and Google
Company Website: https://www.profluent.bio/
Software Category: Protein Design Platform
Source: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20240321410207/en/