An AI MedTech company has launched from ‘stealth’ after securing £40m in funding.
Headquartered in both London and San Francisco, Latent Labs is building AI foundation models to make biology ‘programmable’.
The company was founded by Dr Simon Kohl, previously a co-lead of DeepMind’s protein design team and a senior research scientist on DeepMind’s AlphaFold2, the project which earned a Nobel Prize for Chemistry for Demis Hassabis and John Jumper.
The funding includes a $40m Series A co-led by Radical Ventures and Sofinnova Partners, with the participation of Flying Fish, Isomer, as well as existing investors 8VC, Kindred Capital and Pillar VC.
Notable angel investors include Google chief scientist Jeff Dean, Transformer architecture inventor and Cohere founder Aidan Gomez, and ElevenLabs founder Mati Staniszewski.
DeepMind’s AlphaFold solved the decades-old problems of protein structure prediction and showcased how machine learning can help us understand biology; now, the opportunity lies in advancing and applying the latest generative techniques to design proteins from scratch.
£82.6m to fund AI tackling cancer & other incurable diseases
Latent Labs’ platform claims to do just that – by empowering researchers to computationally create new therapeutic molecules, such as antibodies or enzymes, the AI lab will help partners unlock previously challenging targets and open new paths to personalised medicines. It says partners can leverage the platform to design proteins with improved molecular features, expediting drug development timelines and raising success rates.
“Every biotechnology or pharmaceutical company wants to be at the forefront of technology to find the best therapeutic molecules, yet not all are in a position to develop the most advanced AI models for the job,” said Dr Kohl.
“That’s where Latent Labs comes in. We push the frontiers of generative biology, giving our partners instant access to tools that accelerate their drug design programs.”
Radical Ventures partner Aaron Rosenberg, the former head of strategy & operations at DeepMind, where he contributed to spinning out Isomorphic Labs to build upon AlphaFold, said: “We’ve partnered with Latent Labs because we’re confident that this team will realise the therapeutic and commercial potential of de novo protein design.
“Such a capability has never before been possible, one which can benefit humanity in such a profound way. Accelerating the development of more effective cures for disease, Latent is at the vanguard of innovation in computational biology, and we are excited to join them on this journey.”
Latent Labs has attracted talent from DeepMind, Microsoft, Google, Stability AI, Exscientia, Mammoth Bio, Altos Labs and Zymergen.