Jeff Bezos has had quite a busy week, having just concluded his third venture capital investment in a promising artificial intelligence startup. This time, the recipient of Bezos’s largesse is a company called Profluent Bio Inc., which said today it has raised $106 million to explore its ambitions of making biology more “programmable.”
On this occasion, Bezos didn’t invest on a personal level, but rather through his venture capital firm Bezos Expeditions, which co-led the round alongside Altimeter Capital. Spark Capital, Insight Partners and Air Street Capital also participated in the round, which brings Profluent’s total amount raised to exactly $150 million.
Rather than using traditional methods for biological discovery, Profluent is trying to be more direct. It says its goal is to design new proteins on demand using frontier AI models that it has developed specifically for that purpose. The startup explains that scientists can simply describe to its models what kind of protein they want to design and explain what it should be able to do, using simple natural language prompts. Based on that prompt, it will then set about designing the DNA sequences required to create a new protein that’s capable of doing exactly what the scientist wants.
Profluent said it’s aided by a massive proprietary dataset called the “Protein Atlas,” which describes more than 115 billion existing protein sequences. It believes it’s one of the largest datasets of its kind ever assembled.
The company has already achieved a major breakthrough, demonstrating that scaling laws – which are the same principles that supercharge the capabilities of large language models – also apply to protein design. As its dataset expands and its models improve, they get better at generating complex, functional proteins over time.
One of Profluent’s flagship models is an open-source genome editor called OpenCRISPR-1, and it has already gotten a lot of attention from medical researchers, biotechnology firms and pharmaceutical companies. The ability to edit genomes helped to shine the spotlight on Profluent, but it believes there’s even greater potential in other areas of biology, such as antibodies, antigens and enzymes. It’s developing models that can design new molecules in each of these categories as it strives to become the foundational layer for advanced biological engineering.
Profluent co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Ali Madani said the latest funding will help the company to progress from its lab breakthroughs to real-world applications, such as creating bespoke proteins that can solve major challenges in human health. “Partners are already deploying our technology while our R&D efforts are rapidly expanding the range and depth of our design capabilities,” he said. “This capital enables Profluent to expand our platform’s capabilities and bring abundance to therapeutics, agriculture, and biomanufacturing.”
Bezos didn’t comment on his involvement with Profluent, but Jamin Ball of Altimeter Capital did, saying that its expertise in AI, biology and therapeutic development positions it as the foundation of a massive new industry. “Programmable biology opens the largest design space in nature and reaches into multi-trillion-dollar markets, and Profluent is only at the beginning of exploring it,” he said.
The round comes on the same day that Bezos participated in a $600 million raise by the robotics artificial intelligence startup Physical Intelligence, and just four days after he launched a new startup called Project Prometheus, which secured an impressive $6.4 billion in funding to develop AI for the “physical economy.” In the case of Project Prometheus, Bezos is taking on a hands-on role, serving as its co-chief executive officer alongside co-founder Vik Bajaj.
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