{"id":4835,"date":"2025-02-13T00:15:25","date_gmt":"2025-02-13T00:15:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/fusionmindlabs.com\/blogs\/here-are-a-few-options-for-a-title-with-50-60-characters-or-less-latent-labs-founded-by-deepmind-alumnus-seeks-50m-to-code-biology-latent-labs-making-biology-programmable-with-50m-investme\/"},"modified":"2025-02-13T00:15:25","modified_gmt":"2025-02-13T00:15:25","slug":"here-are-a-few-options-for-a-title-with-50-60-characters-or-less-latent-labs-founded-by-deepmind-alumnus-seeks-50m-to-code-biology-latent-labs-making-biology-programmable-with-50m-investme","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fusionmindlabs.com\/blogs\/here-are-a-few-options-for-a-title-with-50-60-characters-or-less-latent-labs-founded-by-deepmind-alumnus-seeks-50m-to-code-biology-latent-labs-making-biology-programmable-with-50m-investme\/","title":{"rendered":"Here are a few options for a title with 50-60 characters or less:\n\n* “Latent Labs Founded by DeepMind Alumnus Seeks $50M to Code Biology”\n* “Latent Labs: Making Biology Programmable with $50M Investment”\n* “Latent Labs Launched with $50M: Democratizing Programmable Biology”\n* “Latent Labs Brings Programmable Biology to Market with $50M”\n* “Latent Labs $50M Backed, Sets Sights on Making Biology Computable”\n\nLet me know if you have any preferences or if you’d like me to try again!"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/p>\n
\n

A new startup founded by a former Google DeepMind<\/a> scientist is exiting stealth with $50 million in funding.<\/p>\n

Latent Labs<\/a> is building artificial intelligence foundation models to \u201cmake biology programmable,\u201d and it plans to partner with biotech and pharmaceutical companies to generate and optimize proteins.<\/p>\n

Understanding proteins is crucial to comprehend human biology, as they are made up of 20 distinct amino acids that link together in strings to create a 3D structure, determining how a protein functions. Historically, figuring out the shape of each protein was a slow and labor-intensive process. This changed with DeepMind’s breakthrough using AlphaFold, which meshed machine learning with real biological data to predict the shape of some 200 million protein structures.<\/p>\n

With the data provided by AlphaFold, scientists can better understand diseases, design new drugs, and even create synthetic proteins for entirely new use-cases. This is where Latent Labs enters the picture, aiming to enable researchers to \u201ccomputationally create\u201d new therapeutic molecules from scratch.<\/p>\n

Latent potential<\/h2>\n

Simon Kohl, the founder of Latent Labs, started as a research scientist at DeepMind, working with the core AlphaFold2 team. He then co-led the protein design team and set up DeepMind\u2019s wet lab at London\u2019s Francis Crick Institute. At the time, DeepMind also launched a sister company, Isomorphic Labs, focusing on applying DeepMind\u2019s AI research to transform drug discovery. <\/p>\n

Kohl departed DeepMind to focus on building a leaner outfit focused specifically on building cutting-edge models for protein design. He incorporated the business in London at the end of 2022 and hired around 15 employees, including two from DeepMind, a Microsoft engineer, and PhDs from the University of Cambridge.<\/p>\n

\u201cI had a fantastic and impactful time at DeepMind, and became convinced of the impact that generative modelling would have in biology and protein design in particular,\u201d Kohl said. \u201cAt the same time, I saw that with the launch of Isomorphic Labs, and their plans based on AlphaFold2, that they were starting many things at once. I felt like the opportunity was really in going in a laser-focused way about protein design. Protein design, in itself, is such a vast field, and has so much unexplored white space that I thought a really nimble, focused outfit would be able to translate that impact.\u201d<\/p>\n

To translate that impact as a venture-backed startup, Kohl needed to hire more employees. Today, Latent\u2019s headcount is split across two sites \u2014 one in London, where the frontier model magic happens, and another in San Francisco, with its own wet lab and computational protein design team.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis enables us to test our models in the real world and get the feedback that we need to understand whether our models are progressing the way we want,\u201d Kohl said.<\/p>\n

\"Latent
Latent Labs\u2019 London team<\/span>Image Credits:<\/strong>Latent Labs<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

While wet labs are on the agenda, the ultimate goal is to eliminate the need for them in the future.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur mission is to make biology programmable, really bringing biology into the computational realm, where the reliance on biological, wet lab experiments will be reduced over time,\u201d Kohl said.<\/p>\n

This highlights the key benefit of making biology programmable \u2014 upending the drug-discovery process that currently relies on countless experiments and iterations.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt allows us to make really custom molecules without relying on the wet lab \u2014 at least, that\u2019s the vision,\u201d Kohl continued. \u201cImagine a world where someone comes with a hypothesis on what drug target to go after for a particular disease, and our models could, in a \u2018push-button\u2019 way, make a protein drug that comes with all the desired properties baked in.\u201d<\/p>\n

The business of biology<\/h2>\n

Latent Labs doesn\u2019t see itself as \u201casset-centric\u201d \u2014 meaning it won\u2019t be developing its own therapeutic candidates in-house. Instead, it plans to work with third-party partners to expedite and de-risk the earlier R&D stages.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe feel the biggest impact that we can have as a company is by enabling other biopharma, biotechs, and life science companies \u2014 either by giving them direct access to our models, or supporting their discovery programs via project-based partnerships,\u201d Kohl said.<\/p>\n

The company\u2019s $50 million funding includes a previously unannounced $10 million seed tranche, and a fresh $40 million Series A round co-led by Radical Ventures \u2014 specifically, partner Aaron Rosenberg<\/a>, who was formerly head of strategy and operations at DeepMind. <\/p>\n

Other participants in the round include Flying Fish, Isomer, 8VC, Kindred Capital, Pillar VC, and notable angels such as Google\u2019s chief scientist Jeff Dean, Cohere founder Aidan Gomez, and ElevenLabs founder Mati Staniszewski.<\/p>\n

While a portion of the funding will go towards salaries, the company will need more money to cover infrastructure, especially with the building of large models that require a significant amount of GPU compute.<\/p>\n

\u201cCompute is a big cost for us as well \u2014 we\u2019re building fairly large models. This funding really sets us up to double-down on everything \u2014 acquire compute to continue scaling our model, scaling the teams, and also starting to build out the bandwidth and capacity to have these partnerships and the commercial traction that we\u2019re now seeking.\u201d<\/p>\n

Several venture-backed startups are bringing together computation and biology, including Cradle and Bioptimus. Kohl believes we are still at an early stage, where it is unsure what the best approach for decoding and designing biological systems will be.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere have been some very interesting seeds planted \u2014 for example, with AlphaFold and some other early generative models from other groups,\u201d Kohl said. \u201cBut this field hasn\u2019t converged in terms of what is the best model approach, or in terms of what business model will work here. I think we have the capacity to really innovate.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n
Source Link<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A new startup founded by a former Google DeepMind scientist is exiting stealth with $50 million in funding. Latent Labs is building artificial intelligence foundation models to \u201cmake biology programmable,\u201d…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":4836,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47],"tags":[777,1426,1427],"class_list":["post-4835","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-news","tag-deepmind","tag-latent-labs","tag-simon-kohl"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/fusionmindlabs.com\/blogs\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/9\/2025\/02\/Dr-Simon-Kohl-CEO-and-Founder-of-Latent-Labs-e1739199819495.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fusionmindlabs.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4835","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fusionmindlabs.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fusionmindlabs.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fusionmindlabs.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4835"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/fusionmindlabs.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4835\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fusionmindlabs.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4836"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fusionmindlabs.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4835"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fusionmindlabs.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4835"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fusionmindlabs.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4835"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}