
Work Here?
Industries
Data & Analytics
AI & Machine Learning
Biotechnology
Healthcare
Company Size
51-200
Company Stage
Series B
Total Funding
$103.1M
Headquarters
Amsterdam, Netherlands
Founded
2021
Company Does Not Provide H1B Sponsorship
Cradle.bio uses machine learning to design proteins. It provides a secure, private platform where clients can design protein sequences and retain full ownership of their IP. The system learns from each experimental round and proposes protein variants with predicted performance scores, enabling multi-property optimization in a single iteration and accelerating development. The product differentiates itself by offering a private, IP-secure workflow and by integrating biology, computation, and mathematics to optimize multiple properties faster than traditional methods. Cradle.bio serves a wide range of clients—from entrepreneurs to established companies in therapeutics, chemicals, materials, and food—and aims to help them reach their objectives in half the time, effectively shortening the path to market.
Help us improve and share your feedback! Did you find this helpful?
Total Funding
$103M
Above
Industry Average
Funded Over
3 Rounds
Industry standards
Health Insurance
Dental Insurance
Vision Insurance
Life Insurance
Disability Insurance
Company Equity
Professional Development Budget
Remote Work Options
Cradle, an enterprise-grade AI platform for protein engineering, has appointed Marcus Schindler to its advisory board. Schindler previously served as executive vice president for research and early development and chief scientific officer at Novo Nordisk, where he oversaw pipeline development across multiple therapeutic areas. The Amsterdam and Zurich-based company now powers more than 50 protein R&D programmes globally and partners with six of the top 25 biopharma organisations, including Johnson & Johnson, AbbVie and Novo Nordisk. In 2026, Cradle announced a new partnership with Bayer for antibody discovery. Cradle's SaaS platform enables scientists to engineer proteins for various modalities including enzymes, peptides, vaccines and antibodies, accelerating early research and development by two to 12 times. The company is backed by IVP, Index Ventures and Kindred Capital.
Bayer partners with Cradle to advance ai-led drug discovery. Pharma giant Bayer has signed a three-year strategic collaboration with biotech company Cradle to advance AI-enabled antibody discovery and optimisation. Bayer aims to implement Cradle's AI software platform, used for protein engineering, to scale its drug discovery and development efforts. The company intends to integrate Cradle's platform with existing R&D workflows to enhance lead generation and optimisation across the therapeutic antibody pipeline. "We believe AI-driven molecule design, discovery and optimisation will be a key accelerator of our productivity moving forward," said Anastasia Hager, Global Head of Drug Discovery Sciences at Bayer's Pharmaceuticals Division. "Cradle's platform provides us with scalable scientist-centric solutions to maximise the opportunities in our biologics portfolio and potentially deliver faster, more effective medicines to patients." "Bayer's decision reflects a broader shift we're seeing: leading drug discovery organisations want AI that scales across portfolios, formats, and teams without requiring every scientist to become an ML expert or limiting AI's impact to asset-based deals," added Stef van Grieken, Co-Founder and CEO of Cradle. "Cradle brings enterprise-grade, lab-in-the-loop AI into the hands of the expert scientists working daily to design new molecules and treat diseases, helping reduce iterations while improving potency, developability, and manufacturability. We're excited to work with Bayer to operationalise AI at scale and translate it into faster, higher-quality candidates for the clinic." Under the agreement, Cradle will provide Bayer's antibody scientists with full access to its scientific AI software platform supporting a lab-in-the-loop approach, streamlined design-test-learn cycles, and coordinated execution across laboratory and external partners. Bayer and Cradle will also jointly work on a machine learning research project aimed at extending these capabilities even further.
In the ever-evolving world of startups and innovation, the Netherlands continues to shine as a breeding ground for young tech talent.From Amsterdam to Rotterdam, Dutch entrepreneurs are building companies that not only disrupt industries but also build personal fortunes that are nothing short of amazing.Each year, Quote magazine unveils its highly anticipated list of the Top 100 Young Self-Made Millionaires, and the 2025 edition confirms that tech remains dominant.These aren’t just early successes; these are founders building serious empires, ranging from remote work infrastructure to AI, design tools, and even crypto platforms.In this article, we have listed the 15 self-made tech millionaires from the above-mentioned list. Do have a look. Job Van Der VoortPosition: CEONet worth: €650M (8.3% increase from 2024)Remote is a global HR platform that helps companies hire, manage, and pay their entire team globally distributed workforces compliantly. With €650M to his name, and an 8.3 per cent increase from last year, Job credits the rise to solid growth “More margin, more customers, and more products — we’re almost profitable.”Job is the CEO and co-founder of Remote. He was previously a neuroscientist before becoming VP of Product at GitLab, the world’s largest all-remote company. With GitLab, he hired talent from 67 countries. Job is a sought-after presenter and often speaks about scaling a remote-first startup, remote culture, and the future of work.Douwe KielaPosition: CEONet worth: €200M (New to list)Contextual AI specialises in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). The company’s goal is to improve how people work using artificial intelligence (AI)
Newsletter Signup - Under Article / In Page"*" indicates required fields With one of the most densely concentrated life sciences and biotech ecosystems in Europe, the Netherlands is home to numerous biotech and pharmaceutical companies, and also happens to be the headquarters of the European Medicines Agency (EMA), which is now based in Amsterdam after it had to move out of London when the U.K. voted to leave the European Union (EU). As the Netherlands now sets its sights on becoming a global biotech leader by 2040, we take a deeper look at the country’s biotech scene.The Netherlands: Already a well-established biotech hubOverall, the biotech sector in the Netherlands is internationally oriented, with a strong base in early-stage research, academic excellence, and public-private partnerships.According to Annemiek Verkamman, managing director of hollandbio, a biotech industry association, the Netherlands has been building its biotech sector for decades, meaning that it is now a well-established life sciences and biotech hub. “We have world-renowned crop breeding companies, Leiden and Oss are leading biopharmaceutical hub spots, and there is a historical presence of industrial biotech knowledge institutions and companies such as DSM-Firmenich and Corbion.”Thanks to this, the country is now considered to be one of the leading European biotech hubs, along with the likes of Switzerland, France, and the U.K. It is currently home to around 1,979 life sciences companies, including several well-known biotech companies, such as Amsterdam-based uniQure, which developed the first approved gene therapy for hemophilia B.Furthermore, over the past couple of years – particularly since the arrival of the EMA in Amsterdam – the Netherlands has managed to attract a significant number of foreign life sciences companies, whether that be big pharma companies or up-and-coming biotechs. In fact, several large drugmakers, including AstraZeneca, Novartis, and Roche, currently have bases in the country
Newsletter Signup - Under Article / In Page"*" indicates required fields Artificial intelligence (AI) has taken the biotech industry by storm, allowing companies to speed up the drug discovery process while also making it more cost-effective. With so many companies in the industry now embracing the technology, we take a look at 12 AI drug discovery companies. The COVID-19 pandemic revealed AI to be an essential tool in helping to find treatments and vaccines with greater speed and precision. Since then, there have been several drug discovery breakthroughs for AI within the biopharma industry, from helping to quickly and efficiently discover a new antibiotic called abaucin to combat a multi-drug resistant bacteria, to fully discovering and designing a drug that has entered clinical trials. Here are 12 AI drug discovery companies currently making great strides with their technology. Anima Biotech Technology: mRNA biology modulators Disease areas: Immunology, oncology and neuroscienceRecent news: Announced promising preclinical data for lead pulmonary fibrosis candidate Anima Biotech’s AI drug discovery technology is built around its mRNA Lightning.AI platform, which images hundreds of cellular pathways in both healthy and diseased cells to train disease-specific AI models, making use of neural networks to help these models distinguish between healthy and diseased cells and identify dysregulated pathways. These pathways are subsequently analyzed to uncover novel targets backed by experimental validation. Anima currently has 20 preclinical candidates being evaluated for immunology, oncology, and neuroscience indications, with its most advanced candidate indicated for the treatment of lung fibrosis. The company announced in February 2024 that this candidate had shown promising preclinical results and could open up new avenues for treating patients with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. The AI drug discovery company also has ongoing collaborations with several pharma giants. After initially partnering with Eli Lilly in 2018 and Takeda in 2021, its most recent partnership was formed with AbbVie in 2023 for the discovery and development of mRNA biology modulators against oncology and immunology targets. Atomwise Technology: TYK2 inhibitor Disease area: Autoimmune and autoinflammatory diseasesRecent news: Published results showcasing AtomNet’s ability for drug discoveryAtomwise is leveraging the power of AI in an attempt to revolutionize small molecule drug discovery
Find jobs on Simplify and start your career today
Industries
Data & Analytics
AI & Machine Learning
Biotechnology
Healthcare
Company Size
51-200
Company Stage
Series B
Total Funding
$103.1M
Headquarters
Amsterdam, Netherlands
Founded
2021
Find jobs on Simplify and start your career today