The archive · Bio & Materials · Strategic decision · 2023–2025
Latent Labs' $50M bet: ex-DeepMind scientist uses AI to make biology programmable
Simon Kohl left DeepMind's AlphaFold team to make biology programmable: $10M seed plus $40M Series A for AI protein design, no in-house drugs.
Latent Labs
What the business is
Builds AI foundation models that generate and optimize proteins — enzymes, antibodies — for biotech and pharma partners, via direct model access or project partnerships.
Starting capital：$10M seed plus $40M Series A (February 2025), $50M total
How it started
Simon Kohl was a senior research scientist on DeepMind's AlphaFold2 team, co-led the protein design team and set up DeepMind's wet lab at the Francis Crick Institute. He left DeepMind at the end of 2022, incorporated Latent Labs in London in mid-2023 and hired a small team to focus on generative models for protein design.
What happened
In stealth, Latent Labs raised a $10M seed from Kindred Capital, 8VC and Pillar VC and recruited roughly 15 people from DeepMind, Google and Microsoft across London and San Francisco. In February 2025 it exited stealth with a $40M Series A co-led by Radical Ventures and Sofinnova Partners, with angels including Google chief scientist Jeff Dean, Cohere founder Aidan Gomez and ElevenLabs founder Mati Staniszewski.
How it ended up
The company deliberately avoids developing its own drug candidates; revenue is meant to come from partners. As of the February 2025 announcement it was spending the round on compute, UK and US hiring, and building the capacity to service partnerships — no named pharma deals or products yet.
Background
Latent Labs is a London-founded biotech startup created by Simon Kohl, a former DeepMind research scientist who worked on AlphaFold2 and co-led DeepMind's protein design team. His bet: generative AI can make biology programmable, letting scientists design therapeutic proteins computationally instead of iterating in wet labs for years.
The company builds AI foundation models that generate and optimize proteins such as enzymes and antibodies for partners. Kohl argues protein design is a vast, unconverged field and that a nimble, focused outfit — with frontier models in London and a validation wet lab in San Francisco — can translate the AlphaFold breakthrough into real drug-discovery impact faster than a sprawling organization.
Latent Labs raised a $10M seed from Kindred Capital, 8VC and Pillar VC in stealth, then exited with a $40M Series A in February 2025 co-led by Radical Ventures and Sofinnova Partners, bringing total funding to $50M. Angels included Google's Jeff Dean, Cohere's Aidan Gomez and ElevenLabs' Mati Staniszewski.
By design, Latent Labs is not asset-centric: it won't develop its own drug candidates, but sells model access and project-based partnerships to biotech and pharma. As of the announcement, the money was going to more compute, teams in both countries, and the capacity to service those partnerships.
What has to be true
- AlphaFold showed machine learning could predict protein structure at scale, opening the door to generative protein design.
- Protein design is vast, unconverged white space where a focused team can out-run organizations doing many things at once.
- A wet lab alongside the model team gives real-world feedback, so predictions get validated instead of trusted blindly.
- Skipping in-house drug development keeps the company aligned to one thing: selling the model and the partnerships around it.
What can be applied
When a large lab spreads across many frontiers, the focused spin-out can own the white space — and pairing frontier models with a small wet lab closes the validation loop most model shops lack.
Aftermath
As of September 2026 the only published facts are from the February 2025 launch: Latent Labs was spending the $50M on compute for larger models, growing its London and San Francisco teams, and building commercial capacity for partner programs. No commercial products, named pharma partnerships or therapeutic candidates had been disclosed in the sources reviewed.
Sources
- Founded by DeepMind alumnus, Latent Labs launches with $50M to make biology programmable
- Ex-DeepMind scientist raises $40m for new AI biotech startup Latent Labs
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