Cradle

Cradle is an AI protein-engineering company whose product is unusually concrete for the drug-discovery space: software, sold as a subscription, that lets scientists design better proteins in a web browser. A researcher specifies the properties they want — stability, activity, expression — and Cradle's generative models propose sequence changes to get there, tightening the design-build-test loop that dominates protein engineering. This makes Cradle one of the clearest AI-vendor products in the field: a sold tool, not a therapeutics pipeline. Backed by IVP and others, it reports use by several of the world's top-25 pharma companies (including Johnson & Johnson, AbbVie, and Novo Nordisk) across dozens of R&D programs. Its outputs are hypotheses to be validated in the lab; the value is proposing far better candidates to test than trial-and-error alone.