In the field of biotechnology, the new startup Latent Labs is moving from stealth mode to public visibility with $50 million in funding. Founded by former Google DeepMind scientist Simon Kohl, the company aims to leverage artificial intelligence foundational models to "make biology programmable" and collaborates with biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies to generate and optimize proteins.
To understand the mission of Latent Labs, it is essential to recognize the critical role proteins play in biology. Proteins are the fundamental drivers of all activities within living cells, and their structure determines their function. Traditionally, determining the three-dimensional structure of proteins has been a slow and labor-intensive process. DeepMind's groundbreaking achievement, AlphaFold, successfully predicted the structures of approximately 200 million proteins by combining machine learning with real biological data. This advancement provides scientists with better tools to understand diseases, design new drugs, and even create entirely new synthetic proteins.
Simon Kohl, the founder of Latent Labs, was a research scientist at DeepMind and part of the core team for AlphaFold2. At the end of 2022, he realized that there was still significant untapped potential in the field of protein design and decided to independently establish Latent Labs, focusing on developing cutting-edge protein design models.
Currently, Latent Labs has about 15 employees, including several members from DeepMind. The company is headquartered in London and also has a laboratory in San Francisco. This dual presence allows Latent Labs to test its models in real-world environments and obtain the necessary feedback to ensure technological advancement.
Kohl stated that Latent Labs' ultimate goal is to reduce reliance on traditional laboratory experiments, making biological research more efficient and automated. He envisions an ideal scenario where, when scientists propose drug target hypotheses for specific diseases, Latent Labs' models can "push a button" to generate proteins with all the desired characteristics.
In terms of business model, Latent Labs does not plan to develop its own drugs but hopes to accelerate and lower the risks in the early stages of research and development through partnerships with third parties. Kohl believes that collaborating with biopharmaceutical and life sciences companies is essential to maximizing Latent Labs' impact.
This $50 million funding includes $10 million in seed funding and $40 million in Series A investment, with major investors including Radical Ventures and Sofinnova Partners. The funds will primarily be used to expand the team and infrastructure, particularly to build computational capabilities to support large-scale model development.
As more startups and tech giants focus on the computational aspects of biotechnology, Kohl believes this field is still in its early stages, with significant room for innovation in the future.
