Profluent Bio Raises $106M to Scale AI-Designed Proteins and Programmable Biology Platform
Profluent Bio, an AI-driven protein design company, has secured significant new funding as it continues to advance its vision of making biology programmable through large-scale artificial intelligence. In its most recent financing, the company raised $106 million, bringing its total funding to approximately $150 million. The capital will be used to expand Profluent’s frontier AI models and scale applications across therapeutics, diagnostics, agriculture, and biomanufacturing.
The latest round was co-led by Altimeter Capital and Bezos Expeditions, Jeff Bezos’s personal investment firm. Existing investors also participated, including Spark Capital, Insight Partners, and Air Street Capital. With this backing, Profluent has attracted a group of investors known for supporting category-defining technology companies at scale.
Founded in 2022 by CEO Ali Madani, Profluent is focused on using generative AI to design novel, functional proteins from the ground up. The company has gained attention for demonstrating that large language models can generate real proteins with biological function, rather than merely predicting or optimizing existing ones. One of Profluent’s most notable milestones has been the creation of an AI-designed CRISPR gene-editing system, marking a step forward in applying generative models directly to foundational biological tools.
Central to Profluent’s platform is its Protein Atlas, which contains more than 115 billion unique AI-designed proteins. The dataset is used to train and refine the company’s models, enabling them to learn patterns across vast regions of protein sequence space. Profluent has also highlighted that scaling laws similar to those observed in large AI language models apply to protein design, meaning model performance improves predictably as data and compute increase. This insight underpins the company’s strategy of building ever-larger models supported by extensive proprietary data.
Profluent’s technology is already being adopted by researchers and organizations across academia and industry. Its open-source gene-editing system, OpenCRISPR-1, has been used by thousands of scientists and laboratories worldwide, including teams at major biotechnology companies. Beyond genome editing, Profluent is expanding into additional biological modalities, such as antibodies, antigens, and enzymes, broadening the range of problems its AI systems can address.
The company has also pursued strategic collaborations to translate its protein designs into therapeutic impact. Among these is a partnership with Ensoma, a cellular engineering company focused on in vivo therapies, aimed at developing AI-designed base editors for hematopoietic stem cell applications. Such collaborations reflect Profluent’s intent to move beyond tool development and toward clinical and commercial outcomes.
Profluent’s funding history includes a $9 million seed round in 2023 led by Insight Partners, with participation from Air Street Capital, AIX Ventures, and Phoenix Venture Partners. This was followed by a $35 million round in 2024 led by Spark Capital, which helped expand the company’s team, laboratory capabilities, and computational infrastructure. The latest financing significantly accelerates those efforts, enabling Profluent to invest further in model training, wet-lab validation, and commercial partnerships.
Headquartered in Emeryville, California, Profluent sits at the intersection of artificial intelligence and life sciences, a sector that has seen increasing investor interest as AI models become more capable. With strong backing from leading venture firms and a growing portfolio of AI-designed biological systems, Profluent Bio is positioning itself as a key player in the emerging field of programmable biology.
