Insider Brief
- Profluent raised $106 million in new financing, bringing its total to $150 million, to accelerate its mission of making biology programmable through frontier AI-driven protein design.
- The company has demonstrated major scientific firsts, including generating functional proteins with large language models and creating the first AI-designed CRISPR system, while building the world’s largest protein database with over 115 billion unique proteins.
- Profluent’s AI-designed molecules are already used across pharma, biotech, agriculture, and research, positioning the company to expand into multiple therapeutic and biomanufacturing markets and drive the next generation of custom protein solutions.
PRESS RELEASE — Profluent, a leader in frontier AI for protein design, announced a $106 million financing co-led by Altimeter Capital and Bezos Expeditions, with participation from existing investors including Spark Capital, Insight Partners, and Air Street Capital. This round brings Profluent’s total funding to $150 million and will accelerate its mission to make biology programmable — transforming how therapeutics, diagnostics, agriculture, and biomanufacturing solutions are developed.
Profluent is pioneering the development and application of large-scale frontier AI models to protein design. Since its founding, the company has advanced the scientific frontier by being the first to demonstrate that large language models can generate functional proteins (Nature Biotech, 2023), designing the first CRISPR system created from scratch with AI (Nature, 2025), and establishing that scaling laws apply to protein design (NeurIPS spotlight, 2025). Today, the company’s Protein Atlas comprises over 115B unique proteins, the largest protein data resource in the world.
Profluent’s AI-designed molecules and foundation models are already being used across pharma and biotech. OpenCRISPR-1, the company’s open source gene editor, is used by thousands of commercial operations, academic researchers, and some of the world’s largest pharma companies. Profluent has commercial relationships across multiple industries with leaders such as Revvity, Corteva Agrisciences, The Rett Syndrome Research Trust, and Integrated DNA Technologies, Inc. This momentum reflects a broader shift: as models scale, the available design space and number of commercially valuable protein products expand in tandem.
“With this funding, we are accelerating the path from lab breakthroughs to real-world applications, creating bespoke proteins to solve challenges in human health and the environment,” said Ali Madani, Ph.D., Profluent founder and Chief Executive Officer. “Partners are already deploying our technology while our R&D efforts are rapidly expanding the range and depth of our design capabilities. This capital enables Profluent to expand our platform’s capabilities, expand markets, and bring abundance to therapeutics, agriculture, and biomanufacturing.”
The company has expanded its commercial scope beyond genome editors into antibodies, antigens, enzymes, and other biologic formats. The success of its genome editors de-risked the platform as Profluent aims to be the partner of choice across all industries for protein design and optimization. This move continues to pave towards bringing an AI-designed therapeutic to the first human patient.
“Profluent combines world-class AI, biology and therapeutic development expertise against the backdrop of thriving scaling laws,” said Jamin Ball, partner at Altimeter Capital. “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, and Profluent is only at the beginning of exploring it.”
About Profluent
Profluent is an AI-first company pushing the frontier of de novo protein design to author new biology. Grounded in nature with AI as an interpreter, Profluent’s powerful frontier model platform unlocks solutions that transform medicine, agriculture, and beyond. Founded in 2022 and headquartered in Emeryville, CA, Profluent is backed by leading investors including Altimeter Capital, Bezos Expeditions, Spark Capital, Insight Partners, and Air Street Capital. To learn more, visit profluent.bio.
Contacts
Melvin Gruesbeck
press@profluent.bio
