DBT Bureau
Bhubaneswar, 26 June 2024
EvolutionaryScale, an AI startup specializing in biology, has said that it has raised $142 million in seed funding. The funding round was led by Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross, and Lux Capital, with additional support from Amazon Web Services (AWS) and NVIDIA’s venture capital division.
Lux Capital cofounder Josh Wolfe described it as a “ChatGPT moment for biology,” saying the company has developed the first large language model designed to create new proteins and other biological systems.
EvolutionaryScale aims to use its AI for various purposes, such as speeding up drug discovery and creating microbes that can break down plastic, the company has said. AI-driven engineering of new biological systems is a highly exciting field right now.
In May, Microsoft-supported OpenAI partnered with French drugmaker Sanofi to enhance its drug development using AI. Meanwhile, experts have warned that generative AI could also be used to create bioweapons by developing harmful pathogens or toxins.
EvolutionaryScale plans to use the new funding to train its next generation of AI models and expand its team to collaborate with the biotech industry, according to the company. The company is launching new models called ESM3. The smaller ESM3 model will be open-sourced for non-commercial research, while AWS and NVIDIA will offer the larger ESM3 models for commercial use.
The company used ESM3 to create a new fluorescent protein that differs significantly from naturally occurring ones, a process that typically takes nature about 500 million years to achieve through evolution.
AI-driven startups have been the favourites of investors in recent quarters with generative AI further accelerating the trend. In 2023, AI startups raised around $50 billion as LLMs (Large Language Models) and image generator models created waves in the technology industry.
