Latent Labs, a biotech startup founded in 2023 by a former DeepMind research scientist, has exited stealth with a $40m Series A.
Latent promises to “make biology programmable”, using artificial intelligence to create new therapeutic molecules, such as enzymes and antibodies, which can then be used to deliver ever more personalised treatments to individual patients.
The round was led by Toronto-based Radical Ventures and healthcare investor Sofinnova Partners, with angel investments from Cohere founder Aidan Gomez, ElevenLabs founder Mati Staniszewski and Google’s chief scientist Jeff Dean.
CEO and founder Simon Kohl previously worked as a senior research scientist overseeing work on DeepMind’s groundbreaking AlphaFold program, a series of AI models capable of predicting the behaviour of proteins, DNA and other molecules with unprecedented accuracy.
Lauded as a scientific breakthrough upon release, AlphaFold eventually won DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis and director John M. Jumper the Nobel Prize in chemistry.
Asked why he chose to leave DeepMind to launch his own company, Kohl says: “What I saw there was a big appetite to work on many things at once, and I felt quite strongly that protein design deserved a lot of focus […] and translating that to real-word impact was probably best done outside.”
As for what Kohl plans to do with the $40m capital injection, he tells Sifted he has three key priorities: “It’s a mix between acquiring resources — more compute so we can do more research — and then growing our teams both in the UK and also US so we have the muscle to service our partnerships. It’s distributed across those three pillars.”
Latent has offices in London and San Francisco, and has so far recruited around 15 employees from some of the world's leading AI companies, such as DeepMind, Google and Microsoft.
While in stealth, the company raised a $10m seed round from investors at Kindred Capital, 8VC and Pillar VC, bringing the company's total funding to $50m to date. Kindred, 8VC and Pillar also participated in the Series A.
