EvolutionaryScale, an AI company backed by Amazon and Nvidia, secures $142 million in funding for its protein-generating technology.

January 7, 2025February 6, 2025 moneymetrics.org_admin Technology

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A Revolutionary Leap in Scientific Research

EvolutionaryScale, a cutting-edge startup, has secured a massive tranche of cash, amounting to $142 million, to develop artificial intelligence (AI) models that can generate novel proteins for scientific research. This significant funding round was led by ex-GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross, and Lux Capital, with participation from Amazon and NVentures, Nvidia’s corporate venture arm.

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The Frontier Model in Biology

The startup has released ESM3, an AI model it describes as a ‘frontier model’ for biology. This pioneering technology enables the creation of proteins for use in drug discovery and materials science. EvolutionaryScale’s co-founder and chief scientist, Alexander Rives, exclaimed:

"ESM3 takes a step toward a future of biology where AI is a tool to engineer from first principles, the way we engineer structures, machines, and microchips and write computer programs."

The Birth of ESM3

Rives, along with Tom Sercu and Sal Candido, began developing generative AI models to explore proteins while at Meta’s AI research lab, FAIR, in 2019. After their team was disbanded, Rives, Sercu, and Candido left Meta to continue building on the work they’d started.

Proteins: The Building Blocks of Life

Characterizing proteins can reveal the mechanisms of a disease, including ways to slow it or reverse it. Creating proteins can lead to entirely new classes of drugs, tools, and therapeutics. However, the current process for designing proteins in the lab is costly, both from a computational and human resource standpoint.

The Challenges in Protein Design

Designing a protein entails coming up with a structure that could plausibly perform a task inside the body or a product, then finding a protein sequence that corresponds to that structure. This complex process requires significant expertise and computational resources.

ESM3: A Game-Changer in Protein Generation

ESM3 is an AI model that can generate novel protein sequences based on their 3D structure. This technology has the potential to revolutionize the field of protein design, enabling researchers to create new proteins with specific functions.

The Ambitious Plans of EvolutionaryScale

EvolutionaryScale plans to use the funding to further develop ESM3 and explore its applications in various fields, including biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, and materials science. Rives expressed his vision for the company:

"We find that as language models scale, they develop an understanding of the underlying principles of biology, and discover biological structure and function."

A Wildly Ambitious Plan

This reporter finds the ambitious plans of EvolutionaryScale to be wildly optimistic, but having deep-pocketed investors will surely help them achieve their goals.

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