There’s a moment every so often in tech where you can almost feel the ground shifting beneath the industry, and Profluent’s newly announced $106 million financing round has that sort of energy. The funding was co-led by Altimeter Capital and Bezos Expeditions, with continued backing from Spark Capital, Insight Partners, and Air Street Capital. With this round, Profluent now sits at roughly $150 million in total funding—money that isn’t just fuel, but a signal. The era of programmable biology isn’t theoretical anymore, it’s scaling.
Profluent has quietly positioned itself as one of the key pioneers at the intersection of AI and protein design, and that positioning is paying off. The company has already hit milestones that felt almost speculative a few years ago: large language models generating functional proteins (published in *Nature Biotechnology, 2023*), the first CRISPR system created entirely with AI (*Nature, 2025*), and confirmation that scaling laws apply to protein engineering (NeurIPS spotlight, 2025). Those aren’t marketing claims — those are science-history-book milestones.
Their Protein Atlas now includes more than 115 billion unique proteins, which is not just a dataset but a competitive moat. In AI-driven biology, whoever controls the most rich, diverse, accurate biological training data sets the pace — and right now, Profluent appears several steps ahead.
What’s becoming even more compelling is how quickly their work has moved from research novelty to real-world utility. OpenCRISPR-1, their open-source gene editing system, has already been adopted commercially and academically across thousands of organizations. Partnerships span pharma, agriculture, and diagnostics, including major players such as Revvity, Corteva Agrisciences, Integrated DNA Technologies, and patient-advocacy-driven non-profits like The Rett Syndrome Research Trust. When a startup can talk about both open research tools used by thousands *and* commercial adoption with industry giants, it stops being an experiment and becomes infrastructure.
With fresh capital, Profluent is expanding beyond genome editing into antibodies, enzymes, antigens, and new therapeutic classes—essentially broadening its platform to any protein-based modality that could benefit from precision design rather than biological trial-and-error. If the company succeeds, drug development could shift from multi-year iteration cycles to programmable discovery pipelines.
Altimeter Capital’s Jamin Ball summed it up with a line that sticks: Profluent isn’t just another frontier science company, but potentially the backbone of a new industry. Biology represents the largest design space in existence, and the markets it touches—healthcare, agriculture, industrial biotech, even sustainability—run into the trillions.
Somewhere between the hype cycles of generative AI and the slow maturity curve of biotech, Profluent is building something that feels both inevitable and overdue. If they deliver—if they really manage to make biology programmable at scale—today’s investment announcement may eventually read like the seed crystal moment of an entirely new economic era.
Honestly, it’ll be fascinating to watch whether this becomes the next chapter in AI’s evolution: moving from generating text, code, or images—to generating life-changing molecular tools.
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