Latent Labs Exits Stealth with $50 Million in Funding to Make Biology Programmable
Latent Potential
Simon Kohl, a former research scientist at DeepMind, has founded a new startup called Latent Labs, which is building AI foundation models to "make biology programmable." The company aims to partner with biotech and pharmaceutical companies to generate and optimize proteins.
Proteins: The Building Blocks of Life
Proteins are the fundamental components of living cells, made up of 20 distinct amino acids that link together in strings to form a 3D structure, determining how the protein functions. Understanding the shape of each protein was historically a slow and labor-intensive process, but DeepMind’s AlphaFold breakthrough changed this by meshing machine learning with real biological data to predict the shape of some 200 million protein structures.
Latent Labs’ Ambition
Armed with this data, scientists can better understand diseases, design new drugs, and even create synthetic proteins for entirely new use-cases. Latent Labs enters the fray with its ambition to enable researchers to "computationally create" new therapeutic molecules from scratch.
The Business of Biology
Latent Labs doesn’t plan to develop its own therapeutic candidates in-house. Instead, it will work with third-party partners to expedite and de-risk the earlier R&D stages. The company’s $50 million cash injection includes a previously unannounced $10 million seed tranche and a fresh $40 million Series A round co-led by Radical Ventures and Sofinnova Partners.
Conclusion
Latent Labs’ mission is to make biology programmable, bringing biology into the computational realm, and reducing the reliance on biological, wet lab experiments. With its $50 million in funding, the company is poised to revolutionize the way we approach drug discovery and protein design.
FAQs
Q: What is Latent Labs’ mission?
A: Latent Labs’ mission is to make biology programmable, bringing biology into the computational realm, and reducing the reliance on biological, wet lab experiments.
Q: How does Latent Labs plan to achieve its mission?
A: Latent Labs will work with third-party partners to expedite and de-risk the earlier R&D stages, generating and optimizing proteins.
Q: Who are the investors in Latent Labs’ $50 million funding round?
A: The round includes Radical Ventures, Sofinnova Partners, Flying Fish, Isomer, 8VC, Kindred Capital, Pillar VC, and notable angels like Google’s chief scientist Jeff Dean, Cohere founder Aidan Gomez, and ElevenLabs founder Mati Staniszewski.
Q: What will the funding be used for?
A: The funding will be used to scale the company, acquire compute resources, and build out the bandwidth and capacity to have partnerships and commercial traction.
