Tony KulesaAt Pillar, we love to fund the technically brilliant dreamers who see past “impossible” to “inevitable.”
That’s why we wrote the first check for Latent Labs. Now they’ve emerged as a leader in generative biology, raising $50M to scale.
A couple years ago, our friend Sam Rodriques, then at the Crick Institute and now founder of FutureHouse, introduced us to Simon Kohl. Simon had built a collaboration between DeepMind and the Crick Institute, where Sam was faculty. Before that, he had helped build AlphaFold2. Now he was ready to push the frontiers of generative biology even further.
Upon meeting Simon, we immediately recognized the rare combination we seek at Pillar: deep technical mastery and an audacious vision for reshaping an industry.
We invited Simon to Boston for an intensive week of meetings with our friends across the top of biopharma and life science academia.
What emerged was a clear vision for democratizing access to advanced AI tools in drug discovery. While every biotech and pharma company searching for therapeutic molecules understands the role AI can play, most aren’t in a position to develop their own models and tooling at the cutting edge. Simon’s insight was that by giving partners instant access to the best tools, Latent Labs could accelerate drug design across the entire industry.
The intense week we spent collaborating with Simon confirmed what we suspected: this was the kind of breakthrough technology we live to support. We partnered with John Cassidy at Kindred to co-lead a seed round.
Today, we’re thrilled to announce Latent Labs has raised $50M in funding, co-led by Radical Ventures and Sofinnova Partners. The round attracted an exceptional group of angel investors, including Google Chief Scientist, Jeff Dean, Transformer architecture co-inventor and Cohere founder, Aidan Gomez, and ElevenLabs founder, Mati Staniszewski.
We are entering an era where the development of medicines will increasingly become engineering and design, rather than discovery. When Simon was in Stockholm watching Demis Hassabis and John Jumper accept the Nobel Prize for AlphaFold, it wasn’t just a celebration of past achievements. It was a glimpse of what’s possible in generative biology. Latent Labs is building the tools to fully realize this potential.
This is exactly why we exist at Pillar: to find and fund the technical breakthroughs that read like they’re from the future, right before they change everything.
It’s a vast field with so much still to do. But by democratizing access to advanced AI tools for drug design, Latent Labs isn’t just building a successful business, they’re accelerating the development of treatments that could save millions of lives.
Interested in accessing their tools or joining the team? Visit latentlabs.com