
Cradle is an AI-powered protein engineering platform that accelerates the discovery and optimization of proteins. Their platform allows scientists to generate protein candidates, explore experimental data, and manage protein design projects. Cradle is trusted by leading scientific teams at companies like Novo Nordisk, Johnson & Johnson, and IFF. They offer a SaaS subscription model with different licensing tiers (Standard, Enterprise, Academic) that include unlimited users, data storage, and expert support, while ensuring full ownership of intellectual property. The company's approach leverages machine learning models that learn from wet lab data to improve protein properties such as activity, binding, stability, and expression, leading to faster development timelines (reported 1.5-12x faster) and enabling breakthroughs in therapeutics, agricultural solutions, and food ingredients. Cradle is SOC 2 compliant and emphasizes data privacy and security.

Cradle is an AI-powered protein engineering platform that accelerates the discovery and optimization of proteins. Their platform allows scientists to generate protein candidates, explore experimental data, and manage protein design projects. Cradle is trusted by leading scientific teams at companies like Novo Nordisk, Johnson & Johnson, and IFF. They offer a SaaS subscription model with different licensing tiers (Standard, Enterprise, Academic) that include unlimited users, data storage, and expert support, while ensuring full ownership of intellectual property. The company's approach leverages machine learning models that learn from wet lab data to improve protein properties such as activity, binding, stability, and expression, leading to faster development timelines (reported 1.5-12x faster) and enabling breakthroughs in therapeutics, agricultural solutions, and food ingredients. Cradle is SOC 2 compliant and emphasizes data privacy and security.
What they do: AI-powered SaaS platform for protein design and optimization
Customers: Enterprise life-science and industrial customers (examples: Novo Nordisk, Johnson & Johnson, IFF)
Wet lab: Operates an internal wet lab in Amsterdam for model validation and dataset generation
Recent funding: $73M Series B (Nov 2024); prior $24M Series A (Nov 2023)
Protein engineering and discovery for therapeutics, industrial enzymes, vaccines, peptides, food ingredients and agricultural solutions
2021
Biotechnology
Earlier seed round referenced (~$5.5M) in reporting
24000000 USD
73000000 USD
Participation from Index Ventures and Kindred Capital
“Backed by venture investors including IVP, Index Ventures and Kindred Capital; additional individual/angel investors listed”
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This is Cradle Proteins are the molecular machines of life, used for many therapeutic, diagnostic, chemical, agricultural and food applications. Designing and optimizing proteins takes a lot of expert knowledge and manual effort, through the use of custom computational and biological tools.
Machine learning is revolutionizing this space, by enabling high-fidelity protein models. At Cradle, we offer a software platform for AI-guided discovery and optimization of proteins, so that biologists can design proteins faster and at scale. We are already used by clients across biopharma, biotech, agri-tech, food-tech, and academia.
We're an experienced team of around 75 people. We've built many successful products before and have enough funding for multiple years of runway. We are distributed across two main locations, Zurich and Amsterdam, and are focused on building the best possible team culture.
We offer our employees a very competitive salary, a generous equity stake in the company and a wide range of benefits and career progression opportunities.
What We're Building Cradle is building the future of protein engineering. Our AI platform helps scientists design better proteins faster, with customers including Novo Nordisk, Johnson & Johnson, and Grifols. We've raised over $100M to bring ML-powered protein engineering to labs worldwide.
Our in-house wet lab in Amsterdam serves a unique purpose: we generate the high-quality data our ML models need to learn, build showcases that demonstrate what's possible, and develop best practices we share openly with the field. We believe the future of biotech depends on "ML-ready" labs, and we're building the playbook by sharing scripts, protocols, and practices that help our customers (and future customers) generate the data our platform needs.
The Role We're looking for a software engineer to build the critical software infrastructure that connects systems across our lab ecosystem. You'll bridge lab equipment, data systems, and scientists, building the glue that makes our lab easier to work in.
This role formally sits within Software Engineering but is 100% dedicated to supporting BioEngineering. You'll pair with scientists and bioinformatics experts to understand problems, then build software solutions.
What You'll Do To give you a flavour of the projects you'd work on:
Connect lab equipment and tools Build bidirectional connections between our lab instruments and Benchling using UniteLabs' integration platform and Python SDK. This means pulling data from machines (plate readers, sequencers, NanoDSF, LabChip, Carterra) into our data warehouse, and controlling instruments programmatically. Build reliable ETL pipelines that capture experimental results.
Develop in silico analysis workflows Write the scientific analysis logic that turns raw experimental data into results. This includes NGS analysis pipelines for Illumina and Nanopore data (if these terms are not familiar to you, don’t fret: you'll pair with a bioinformatician), and algorithms for interpreting characterization assays. A concrete example: analyzing photos from our colony picker to detect colonies using object recognition, then triggering the picker to pick them.
Build and maintain workflows Develop and refactor in silico (Flyte) workflows that orchestrate laboratory processes. Create robust, testable systems that handle the complexity of real lab operations.
Lab automation workcell Build a user-friendly interface for our robotic workcell (a robotic arm coordinating multiple instruments). The goal is a low-barrier, walk-up system where running an experiment is easy. This includes frontend, backend, and the connection layer to our existing machine drivers.
Contribute to open-source initiatives Help us share tools, SDKs, and workflows with the broader scientific community. You'll work on building integrations and tools that make it easier for other organizations to adopt Cradle and connect it with their lab ecosystems, lowering barriers to entry for protein engineering teams worldwide.
What You Bring Technical foundation
Builder mentality
Not Required
Learning More About The BioEngineering Team We're quite open about what we work on. If you'd like to learn more before applying, check out blog posts from our team (link 1, link 2) or watch the webinar we did with Lab Services on how we’re using automation in our lab (link).
Our commitment to inclusive hiring Cradle evaluates all candidates based on merit, regardless of sex, gender, ethnicity, socio-economic background, or any other aspect of identity. We maintain zero tolerance for discrimination and actively encourage candidates from all backgrounds to apply.
A Notice About Recruitment Scams Please be aware that scammers are posing as us in order to get your personal details or money. We only communicate via @cradle.bio email addresses, we only make job offers after having met you in person at our office in Zurich or Amsterdam, and we never ask you to pay for anything during the interview process.