About
Cradle builds AI-powered protein engineering software for biopharma, industrial biotechnology, foodtech, and other life-science R&D teams. Its platform uses customers’ experimental data to optimize multiple protein properties simultaneously, helping scientists achieve successful candidates in fewer experimental rounds while keeping proprietary data and intellectual property private.
Market
Cradle competes in AI-driven protein design and computational biotechnology, serving drug-discovery, pharmaceutical, and industrial-biotech workflows. It positions its platform as a scientist-oriented, data-guided protein-engineering system that reduces experimental iterations, optimizes multiple protein objectives, and can accelerate development by up to 12x; its stated differentiation is the integration of customers’ experimental data with AI-generated candidates and property optimization.
Cradle targets scientific and R&D teams at biotechnology, pharmaceutical, chemical, food, and agriculture companies that engineer proteins. Its users are primarily biologists and protein-engineering researchers, serving both dedicated biotech teams and large enterprise organizations such as pharma and industrial-biotech companies.
At a Glance
Problem
Protein engineering is slowed by an iterative wet-lab process: biologists must generate protein variants, test them, learn from the results, and repeat. That experimentation creates time, cost, and development-cycle risk, particularly when teams are trying to improve several properties at once. Cradle’s central use case is shortening this cycle for the discovery and optimization of therapeutic and industrial proteins, including enzymes, antibodies, and other bio-based products.
Product / Service
Cradle provides a business-to-business machine-learning software platform for protein engineering. Its prediction algorithms and AI design recommendations help scientists generate protein candidates and improve their properties, while incorporating the customer’s own experimental data to guide subsequent designs. The platform supports multiple protein modalities and applications, including antibodies, enzymes, peptides, vaccines, and therapeutic proteins.
The benefit is better protein candidates with fewer experimental rounds, accelerating the development of therapeutics and bio-based products. Cradle also emphasizes customer ownership of intellectual property and the privacy and security of users’ sequences and data, which are important requirements for pharmaceutical and industrial customers.
Market
Cradle competes in AI-enabled protein engineering and computational protein-design software, serving biopharma and industrial-biotechnology customers across pharmaceuticals, chemicals, food, and agriculture. The available evidence indicates that Cradle has competitors in this category, but does not name specific rival companies, so a reliable competitor-by-competitor comparison cannot be made from the supplied research.
Cradle was founded in 2021 and appears to be a commercial, rather than merely pre-revenue, company: it has reported serving six of the top 25 pharmaceutical leaders and raised a $73 million Series B, bringing total funding to more than $100 million. Third-party sources provide revenue estimates, but they conflict and are explicitly non-audited estimates, so the company’s actual revenue is not established by the available evidence.
Founders & Leadership
Funding History
Index Ventures, Kindred Capital
Index Ventures
IVP
Recent News
Cradle launched Guided Rounds, a structured workflow that guides scientists from experimental data through model training, sequence design, review, and lab-ready candidates. The feature was made available to all users.
Cradle described its zero-shot antibody diversification workflow for campaigns starting with little or no labeled training data. The company reported affinity improvements as high as 350-fold in some campaigns and explained how the approach initiates subsequent active-learning optimization.
Lundbeck partnered with Cradle to use its AI-powered protein design platform for biotherapeutic discovery and optimization. The collaboration initially focuses on two antibody programs targeting CNS diseases and establishes Lundbeck’s first end-to-end AI-guided protein-engineering workflow.
R&D World coverage highlighted Cradle’s CRADLE-1 preprint and discussed the company’s approach to openness in protein engineering. The article also noted Cradle’s partnership with Novo Nordisk and use by companies including Johnson & Johnson, AbbVie, and Argenx.
Labcritics covered Cradle’s CRADLE-1 automated machine-learning framework for multi-property protein lead optimization. The article reported faster optimization across protein modalities and highlighted case studies involving antibodies and nanobodies.
Cradle researchers published a bioRxiv preprint introducing CRADLE-1, an automated framework for protein engineering and lead optimization. The work addresses optimization beyond de novo design across a broad range of protein types.
Union.ai published a case study on Cradle’s integration of Flyte for machine-learning workflow orchestration. Cradle reported that Flyte reduced ML development cycles from three days to three hours while improving caching, provenance, reproducibility, and infrastructure flexibility.
Bayer signed a three-year strategic collaboration with Cradle to use its AI software platform for antibody discovery and optimization. The agreement gives Bayer’s antibody scientists access to a lab-in-the-loop platform integrated with existing R&D workflows.
Cradle announced 2025 growth milestones, including more than 50 projects, programs at six of the top 25 pharmaceutical companies, a doubled headcount, and expanded U.S. operations. The company also disclosed a 2025 partnership with Novo Nordisk to accelerate next-generation GLP-1 therapeutic candidates.
Active Roles
6Business Model
Cradle sells enterprise software licenses and subscriptions for its AI protein-engineering platform. Customers retain ownership of their sequence IP and data, with licenses including platform/API access and no royalty or milestone fees.
Products
Customers
Tech Stack
Similar Companies
Competitors
Key Investors
Index Ventures, IVP, Kindred Capital