EvolutionaryScale Raises $142M for Protein-Generating AI

A new startup, EvolutionaryScale, has secured a massive $142 million investment to develop AI models that can generate novel proteins for scientific research.

The company, founded by former Meta researchers, has created an AI model called ESM3, which can design proteins for use in drug discovery and materials science. EvolutionaryScale claims that ESM3 can "reason over" the sequence, structure, and function of proteins, enabling the model to generate new proteins.

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The startup plans to make money through a combination of partnerships, usage fees, and revenue sharing. EvolutionaryScale might work with pharmaceutical companies to integrate ESM3 into their workflows, or revenue-share with researchers for breakthrough discoveries commercialized using ESM3.

To this end, EvolutionaryScale says that it will soon bring ESM3 and its derivatives to select AWS customers via the cloud provider's SageMaker AI dev platform, the Bedrock AI platform, and HealthOmics service. ESM3 will also be available to select customers using NVIDIA's NIM microservices, supported with an NVIDIA enterprise software license.

EvolutionaryScale says that both AWS and NVIDIA customers will be able to fine-tune ESM3 using their own data.

While it may take a decade for generative AI models to help design therapies, EvolutionaryScale is betting big on scaling up its model training to incorporate data beyond proteins and create a general-purpose AI model for biotech applications.

The company's big vision is to create AI models that can discover biological structure and function, enabling breakthroughs in fields like drug discovery and materials science.

AndroGuider Team

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