protein-design
(5)
Pando Bioscience
Pando Bioscience is an AI-driven synthetic biology company that engineers better enzymes for the pharmaceutical and diagnostics industries. It pairs a generative-AI design model with an ultra-high-throughput 'one-pot' screening platform that tests roughly 1,000 times more enzyme variants - about 75% faster and 80% cheaper than conventional methods - compressing the design-build-test-learn cycle to about one month. Founded in 2022 by former Ginkgo Bioworks scientists Will Cao and Yang Wang, Pando both improves customers' enzymes and builds its own proprietary enzyme assets, such as the Saiyan-Phi29 polymerase.
Aizen Therapeutics
Aizen Therapeutics is a San Diego, AI-driven biotech spun out of Caltech that designs Mirror Peptides - synthetic drugs built entirely from D-amino acids, the mirror image of the L-amino acids that make up natural proteins. Its DaX platform pairs generative AI with structural biology to design these molecules from scratch, aiming for drugs with the potency of biologics but greater stability, lower immunogenicity, and the potential to be taken orally. The company emerged from stealth in November 2024 with a $13M seed round.
Outpace Bio
Outpace Bio is a Seattle biotech using AI-powered de novo protein design to program immune cells - especially CAR T cells - that can recognize and destroy solid tumors while limiting harmful side effects. Spun out of Lyell Immunopharma in 2021 by Institute for Protein Design alumni, the company has raised roughly $199M and is advancing its lead candidate, OPB-101, a mesothelin-targeted CAR T therapy for platinum-resistant ovarian cancer, toward the clinic.
Tamarind Bio
Tamarind Bio is a San Francisco software company building cloud infrastructure that lets bench scientists run 250+ AI and physics-based models for drug discovery - tools like AlphaFold, RFdiffusion, ProteinMPNN and GROMACS - through a no-code web interface and API, without managing GPUs, data pipelines or DevOps. Founded in 2023 by Stanford computer scientist Deniz Kavi and Sherry Liu, the company serves over 10,000 scientists, including 8 of the top 20 pharmaceutical companies, and raised a $13.6M Series A in February 2026.
Profluent
Profluent is an AI-first protein design company building frontier models that author novel proteins - including the first AI-designed CRISPR gene editor, OpenCRISPR-1. Based in Berkeley's biotech corridor, the company applies the same scaling-law playbook that worked for language models to the language of biology, then validates the outputs in a wet lab.