The Berkeley, California-based biotechnology startup that uses artificial intelligence for protein design Profluent today announced the completion of a new $35 million funding round led by Spark Capital, with participation from existing investors Insight Partners and Air Street Capital, as well as angel investors from OpenAI, Salesforce, Octant Bio, and Google, including Google DeepMind Chief Scientist Jeff Dean. The company previously raised $9 million in seed funding from Insight Partners, Air Street Capital, AIX Ventures, and Convergent Ventures.
The funds raised in this round will be used to scale foundational AI models for biomedicine and first tackle the challenges in the vertical field of gene editing.
Profluent was co-founded in 2022 by Madani, who previously led the machine learning research program at Salesforce Research, and Alexander Meeske, an assistant professor of microbiology at the University of Washington School of Medicine. The company is committed to developing deep generative models to design and validate novel functional proteins, thereby revolutionizing biomedicine.
(Source:BusinessWire）