Cradle

Cradle is the protein engineering platform of Cradle Bio B.V., a Dutch company founded in Amsterdam in 2021. It does not build foundation models; instead it fine-tunes pretrained protein language models and retrains them on each round of a customer's wet-lab data, squeezing antibody, enzyme and peptide optimization into a design–build–test–learn loop.

Core capabilities

• Project-specific models: trains the fitness landscape of a given molecule on the customer's own assay data and retrains after every experimental round
• Multi-attribute parallel optimization: one primary objective with several constraints, pushing affinity, stability, expression level and developability together
• Plate design: over 10,000 simulations to pick diverse plates, with fixed regions and liability motifs constrained at the generation stage
• Round forecasting: scores candidate plates before synthesis and assaying, predicting hit rate and remaining headroom so teams can decide whether to run, adjust or stop
• Web app and full-featured API: everything the web UI can do is available through the API, and your data is never used to train other companies' models

Where it fits Biopharma and industrial biotech teams that already have measurable assays and wet-lab scheduling and want to embed AI into their existing workflows without giving up molecular rights. Individual developers and purely computational teams without experimental capability will find little use for it.

Differentiation Competitor Latent Labs goes for free daily credits plus self-serve signup; Cradle does the opposite and offers only annual enterprise licenses: sequence IP stays entirely with the customer, with no royalties and no milestone payments, which alone removes most of a pharma company's legal friction. SOC 2 Type II plus ISO 27001, and EU data residency.

Editorial take The customer list is hard currency: J&J, Novo Nordisk, Bayer, Lundbeck and UCB all carry press releases on their own sites, and the official line is 8 of the global Top 25 pharma companies and 80+ active projects. But discount it: CRADLE-1 exists only as a bioRxiv preprint whose authors are all employees, with no peer review; the claims of 2–12x speedup and up to 90% lower cost are all self-reported; G2 shows zero reviews; and directory sites even pin another Cradle's $19/month on it. Pricing is undisclosed, there is no trial and no Chinese-language site, so negotiate the license before procuring.