Profluent Secures $106M to Advance AI-Driven Protein Design Platform
核心洞察
Profluent (搜索) raised $106 million in funding led by Jeff Bezos's Bezos Expeditions (搜索) and Altimeter Capital (搜索), bringing total investment to $150 million with a valuation approaching $1 billion.
The company has created the world's largest protein database with 115 billion unique proteins (搜索) and demonstrated that scaling laws apply to AI-driven protein design.
Profluent (搜索)'s AI models enable scientists to design custom proteins (搜索) by describing desired properties in human language, with applications spanning therapeutics, diagnostics, and agriculture.
Profluent (搜索), an AI-driven protein design company, announced Wednesday it has raised $106 million in new venture funding co-led by Jeff Bezos's Bezos Expeditions (搜索) and Altimeter Capital (搜索). The financing brings the Emeryville, California-based startup's total funding to $150 million and pushes its valuation toward $1 billion as it scales its frontier AI models for programmable biology.
The company's technology represents a significant advancement in protein engineering, allowing scientists to describe desired protein properties in human language—such as stability or ease of manufacturing—and receive a DNA recipe to create that protein. This approach moves beyond traditional drug discovery methods that rely on finding existing proteins (搜索) to instead custom-design completely new proteins for specific therapeutic needs.
Revolutionary AI Platform Demonstrates Scaling Laws
Profluent (搜索) has established itself as a pioneer in applying large language models to biological systems. The company was the first to demonstrate that large language models can generate functional proteins (搜索), as published in Nature Biotechnology in 2023. More recently, it designed the first CRISPR (搜索) system created from scratch with AI, published in Nature in 2025, and proved that scaling laws apply to protein design, featured as a spotlight paper at NeurIPS 2025.
"The same architecture used for English, you can use for biological languages like proteins (搜索)," explained Ali Madani, Profluent (搜索)'s founder and CEO, who holds a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley and was the lead author of the original Nature Biotechnology paper on ProGen (搜索) while at Salesforce (搜索).
The company has built what it calls the Protein Atlas, comprising over 115 billion unique proteins (搜索)—the largest protein data resource in the world. This massive dataset, combined with increased computational power, enables the development of more sophisticated AI models through scaling laws, a concept that has proven transformative in other AI applications.
Commercial Traction Across Multiple Industries
Profluent (搜索)'s technology has already gained significant commercial adoption. Its OpenCRISPR-1 (搜索), an open-source gene editor designed entirely by AI, is being used by thousands of commercial operations, academic researchers, and some of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies. The company has established commercial relationships with industry leaders including Revvity (搜索), an $11 billion market cap biotech company; Corteva Agrisciences (搜索), the agricultural spinoff of DuPont; The Rett Syndrome (搜索) Research Trust; and Integrated DNA Technologies.
"Partners are already deploying our technology while our R&D efforts are rapidly expanding the range and depth of our design capabilities," Madani said. The company has expanded beyond genome editors to include antibodies (搜索), antigens (搜索), enzymes (搜索), and other biologic formats in its commercial scope.
Addressing Industry Challenges
The funding comes as the pharmaceutical industry grapples with high failure rates and escalating development costs, with 90% of new drugs failing and development costs running into the billions. An increasing number of companies are turning to AI-enabled protein design to address these challenges, creating a competitive landscape that includes heavyweights like Isomorphic Labs (搜索), Google's DeepMind (搜索) spinoff, and well-funded startups like Xaira Therapeutics (搜索), which emerged from stealth with $1 billion in funding.
"The proposition of making biology programmable is going to enable blockbuster drugs, and solutions across therapeutics, diagnostics and agriculture—and it's going to require a lot of capital," Madani stated.
Investor Confidence in Biological AI
Jamin Ball, partner at Altimeter Capital (搜索), emphasized the transformative potential of the technology. "Profluent (搜索) combines world-class AI, biology and therapeutic development expertise against the backdrop of thriving scaling laws," Ball said. "This positions them not just as a frontier science company, but as the foundation of a massive new industry. Programmable biology opens the largest design space in nature and reaches into multi-trillion-dollar markets."
Ball, who first met Madani 18 months ago, described the opportunity as "massive" in enabling scientists to move from happenstance in drug discovery to bespoke design. "We think the next frontier in AI will be biology and drug discovery," he added.
Future Applications and Market Potential
Beyond therapeutics, Profluent (搜索)'s technology holds promise for agriculture, where researchers aim to create more resilient and sustainable crops. The company's approach to making biology programmable could enable breakthroughs across multiple sectors, from biomanufacturing to environmental solutions.
"One of the reasons Jeff [Bezos] was interested is that we have discovered scaling laws apply to biology," Madani explained. "As you gain more and more data, the models get better and better."
The company recently introduced Profluent E-1 (搜索), a new foundation model that provides evolutionary context to protein design. This advancement represents another step toward the company's ultimate goal of bringing an AI-designed therapeutic to the first human patient.
"We are still really early," Madani said, comparing the current state of AI-enabled biology to the early days of the Internet. "If we can have a machine that can truly make biology programmable, we will have a conveyer belt of blockbuster solutions."