By Anshika Mathews · AIM Media House
Profluent, a fast-growing player in protein engineering, has secured 106 million dollars in new financing co-led by Altimeter Capital and Bezos Expeditions.
The round brings its total funding to 150 million dollars, giving the Emeryville, California-based startup fresh capital to accelerate its push to make biology “programmable” across therapeutics, diagnostics, agriculture and biomanufacturing.
Founded by machine-learning scientist Ali Madani , Profluent is one of the few companies applying large-scale language models directly to the design of new biological molecules.
The company has already notched a series of scientific firsts: the demonstration that LLMs can generate functional proteins (Nature Biotechnology, 2023), the creation of the first AI-designed CRISPR system built entirely from scratch (Nature, 2025), and the establishment that scaling laws apply to protein design (NeurIPS spotlight, 2025).
At the core of its platform is the Protein Atlas, a collection of more than 115 billion unique proteins, which the company describes as the largest protein data resource in existence. Profluent’s early breakthrough came through OpenCRISPR-1, its open-source gene editor trained on specialized protein language models.
The tool is now used by thousands of commercial labs, academic groups and major pharmaceutical companies. That traction has allowed the company to expand its commercial scope into antibodies, antigens, enzymes, and other biologic formats.
“With this funding, we are accelerating the path from lab breakthroughs to real-world applications, creating bespoke proteins to solve challenges in human health and the environment,” Madani said. He added that the capital allows the company to broaden market reach while deepening its R&D pipeline.
Profluent has already signed commercial relationships with companies including Revvity, Corteva Agrisciences, The Rett Syndrome Research Trust, and Integrated DNA Technologies.
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