Cradle AI-powered protein engineering platform serving six of top 25 pharma leaders

Biotech innovator accelerated growth in 2025, doubled headcount, and expanded operations in the US

AMSTERDAM and ZURICH, Dec. 16, 2025 /PRNewswire/ — Cradle, an enterprise-grade AI software platform, today announced a series of milestones that signal a new phase of growth. The company saw rapid adoption across the pharma industry, with Cradle now running 50+ projects and powering drug discovery programs for six of the top 25 big pharma companies, including Johnson & Johnson, Abbvie, and Novo Nordisk. To continue expanding product capabilities and meet surging global demand, the company has doubled headcount across all departments and expanded operations in the United States, where it is building dedicated teams to support customers, scale deployment and deepen partnerships across the US biotech ecosystem. 

The Cradle platform provides AI protein design tools trained on unique customer data and tailored for their customer’s specific needs, enabling world-class scientist teams within big pharma companies to conduct drug discovery themselves without the complexities or IP concerns around popular “biobucks” partnership models. Over the past year, Cradle continued extending its scientist-first software platform with new features, updates and support for new protein types. Customers are using Cradle’s platform to speed up early research and development projects by up to 12x, with cost reductions of up to 90%.

The company scaled multiple proof of concept projects into multiyear commitments, while existing customers increased the number and scale of projects across their protein development pipelines. Cradle customers are leading the way developing novel treatments that can deliver wide-changing impact across society, from making personalized medicine a reality to treating previously undruggable diseases. In 2025, the company partnered with Novo Nordisk to accelerate development of therapeutic candidates that could become the next generation of GLP-1 smash hits like Wegovy and Ozempic.

“2025 was an exceptional year for Cradle. We made AI a powerful, everyday tool for scientists building a new era of biologics, and we’re just getting started,” said Stef van Grieken, Co-founder and CEO of Cradle. “From enhancing our platform to adding tremendous talent to our team to expanding our physical footprint across Europe and the U.S., building the AI infrastructure essential to deliver AI-designed therapeutics, enzymes and materials at unprecedented cost and speed. We’re looking forward to welcoming more world-class R&D organizations to our customer base soon as we carry this momentum into 2026.”

About Cradle
Cradle’s mission is to make engineering biology easier, quicker and more cost-effective. Its enterprise-grade AI software platform currently serves six of the top 25 global pharma companies, and is used across over 50 R&D programs. With Cradle, scientists can engineer better proteins, faster and more successfully, speeding up the development cycle of new therapeutics and bio-based products such as, antibodies, enzymes, and bio-based materials by up to 12x. Cradle is based in Amsterdam, The Netherlands; Zurich, Switzerland and the United States with a team of machine learning and biotech research specialists with experience at many of the world’s leading technology and biotech companies, including Google, Novartis, Meta, Zymergen, Uber, Deepmind and Generate Biomedicines. Cradle is backed by IVP as well as Index Ventures and Kindred Capital. For more information, visit cradle.bio.

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SOURCE Cradle