What Cradle does
Cradle (cradle.bio) is an enterprise AI platform for protein engineering that combines (1) generative ML for designing protein sequence candidates and (2) an in-house wet-lab system used to validate and continuously improve the platform’s models. The company positions its product as a “lab-in-the-loop” workflow for scientist teams, aimed at making the design–test–learn cycle faster and more reliable while keeping customer sequences and data private. Cradle supports multiple protein modalities (e.g., antibodies, enzymes, peptides, vaccines) and is designed to optimize multi-property protein trade-offs simultaneously rather than sequentially.
In practice, Cradle’s platform centers around structured “rounds” (campaign steps) that guide users from raw data to lab-ready candidates, with best-practice defaults and traceability (audit/provenance) across datasets, model training, candidate generation, and evaluation. The company also describes workflows for integrating experimental results back into modeling so the system can learn across rounds.
Cradle’s go-to-market focus is enterprise software licensing for biopharma and industrial biology teams, alongside targeted academic programs. The company reports that it serves large pharma customers (including Johnson & Johnson and Novo Nordisk) and that it runs a wet lab in Amsterdam used for internal validation and model improvement before shipping changes to customers.
Strategically, Cradle is scaling platform adoption and customer deployments (including in the US) while expanding both its wet-lab capabilities and its engineering/go-to-market capacity following its later-stage funding. It has also announced enterprise partnerships/collaborations with major pharma companies (e.g., Bayer, Lundbeck) to operationalize its lab-in-the-loop AI approach for antibody and biotherapeutic discovery/optimization.