Cradle: Revolutionizing Protein Engineering with a secure AI platform built on Google Cloud
About Cradle
Founded in 2021, Cradle is a biotechnology startup that uses AI to revolutionize protein engineering. Their innovative platform enables faster, more cost-effective development of novel, high-performing proteins for various industries, including pharmaceuticals, chemicals, food, and agriculture. With a team of approximately 40 experts based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and Zurich, Switzerland, Cradle is dedicated to making protein engineering accessible and efficient for research and development teams worldwide.
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Contact usTo ensure the confidentiality and integrity of customers' sensitive research and development data, Cradle partnered with Google Cloud to build its protein design platform. By leveraging Google Cloud's advanced data protection solutions, Cradle created a secure environment that empowers customers to innovate without compromising the safety of their valuable intellectual property.
Google Cloud results
- A highly secure environment tailored to protect customers' intellectual property
- Reduced R&D spend and shortened timelines
- Cradle's AI platform increases the chance of a project being ultimately successful by proposing unintuitive designs that humans might not consider
- Increased adoption of generative ML models
Faster, cheaper, more successful protein design
Cradle's software platform is at the forefront of biotechnological innovation, empowering research and development teams across various industries, including pharmaceuticals, chemicals, food, and agriculture. The scalable and secure platform harnesses the potential of AI to accelerate protein engineering, making it faster, more cost-effective, and more innovative.
Stef van Grieken, CEO of Cradle, explains the significance of proteins: "Proteins are nature's machines that drive every living cell. Their intricate structure allows them to interact with molecules, breaking them apart or combining them to create something new. While the most well-known example is converting sugar into alcohol, proteins are able to produce a wide range of products, from food ingredients to industrial chemicals and medicines. Proteins can often do this far more efficiently and more sustainably than traditional methods of production, such as a chemical factory or a factory farm. In medicine, proteins play a crucial role as therapeutics, diagnostics, and research tools, treating conditions, such as cancer, autoimmune disorders, and infectious diseases, as well as detecting disease biomarkers and studying the underlying biology of human health."
Stef continues, "Despite their immense potential, designing proteins to perform specific functions is a complex and challenging process. At Cradle, we have seen recent breakthroughs in AI that can significantly accelerate the development of protein-based products, making it easier, faster, and more cost-effective to create safer and more effective proteins for various applications. Our user-friendly web application puts this powerful technology in the hands of R&D teams, enabling them to tackle major challenges, from developing new therapeutics to producing sustainable materials."
Cradle's solution enables the generation of effective, safe, and manufacturable protein-based products while reducing the number of experimental cycles needed during research and development. The platform also accelerates in generating protein variants that wouldn't be intuitively designed by humans using traditional design methods, thus increasing the chances of success for any given project.
Establishing trust with a platform providing state-of-the-art security
Biotechnological research and development is a time-consuming and costly endeavor, often involving thousands of experiments and generating highly confidential and sensitive data that forms the core intellectual property of the company developing the product. These R&D programs can span several years and cost millions of dollars in experimental data collection.
Stef emphasizes the importance of data security: "Given the sensitive and strategic nature of the data shared with our software platform, any leak or loss could have severe consequences for our customers' organizations. Ensuring the security and privacy of our customers' data is one of our top priorities."
"At Cradle, one of our main responsibilities is to ensure the security and privacy of our customers' data, which often comprises precious intellectual property and is the result of many years of investment in research and development."
—Stef van Grieken, Founder and CEO, CradleCradle carefully considered various cloud providers before selecting Google Cloud as the foundation for its platform. Noé Lutz, a member of the Cradle team, explains, "Before joining Cradle, I spent over a decade ensuring the safety of Google's data as a director in the Google Security organization and the Threat Analysis Group. We chose Google Cloud because of our familiarity with its robust security measures, and we knew Google approaches security with the same gravity as we do at Cradle."
Convinced that data security is primarily an engineering issue, Cradle's objective was to devise systems and safeguards that natively block a wide range of potential attacks from both outside and inside any organization. To do this, the company adopted a defense-in-depth strategy that integrates safeguards at every architectural level, from every Cradler's device to the SaaS platform's web interface, not forgetting AI processing.
Noé highlights how Cradle's approach differs from others in the industry: "While most companies in our industry focus on building a wall around their data and reducing risks through compliance, we know that relying solely on perimeter security leaves organizations vulnerable to attacks targeting machines and individuals within the trusted perimeter."
Noé continues: "Compliance obviously plays a crucial role, and we're adopting SOC 2 and ISO 27001 standards for our SaaS platform, but we're also convinced it's not enough to guarantee the security of our customers' data. The high-tech industry has long moved away from relying on firewalls and compliance stickers, instead making security an integral part of their engineering efforts and building protections throughout their tech stack. Cradle is bringing this level of security to the biotech industry."
High security, supported by Google's time-tested experience
Cradle's experienced team knows that devising natively secure, or secure-by-design, systems is tough. "This is where our partnership with Google Cloud comes into play," Noé explains. "Google Cloud has been a leader in security for over a decade, safeguarding the data of billions of users and enterprise clients. They pioneered technologies, such as zero-trust architecture and unphishable multi-factor authentication. We share a security vision that prioritizes defense-in-depth engineering over mere compliance and access control."
"Google Cloud has been a leader in terms of security for more than a decade, pioneering technologies, such as zero-trust architecture and unphishable multi-factor authentication. It also shares our vision that security is more a question of defense-in-depth engineering, rather than just a compliance issue."
—Noé Lutz from CradleIn practice, Cradle's platform relies on BeyondCorp, an approach based on the zero-trust philosophy, which enables implementation of finer grained access control protections. More effective than traditional firewalls and VPNs, BeyondCorp manages access to resources and data based on user identity, device trust, and user behavior in specific contexts. This allows for more precise determination of data access and better observability of potentially malicious behavior from known users or bad actors.
To protect individual user accounts, Cradle has implemented unphishable multi-factor authentication using physical security keys for its employees and relies on Google Cloud as an identity provider for all external services. The company also uses Google Identity and Access Management (IAM) for access control, covering internal users, customers, and infrastructure access.
Stef adds, "A public secret in security is that many threats originate from within organizations. To maintain best-in-class internal security, we use Google Workspace alongside BeyondCorp, creating a secure environment where all company data is centrally hosted, encrypted, and protected by strong authentication and authorization is logged, and audited for anomalies. Our strategy is pretty simple: by adopting Google Cloud's solutions, we can focus our engineering resources on innovation, advancing our AI algorithms, and developing our SaaS platform, knowing that we can rely on Google Cloud's mature, time-tested best practices, security services, and application-level security to extend Google's best-in-class security to our business and customers."
Working toward a more innovative world
Barely two years after its launch, Cradle already has multiple renowned customers, such as Johnson & Johnson, Novozymes, and Twist using its platform to accelerate research and development. This serves as a testament to the trust Cradle has built. Ultimately, Cradle aims to enable organizations of all sizes, from large enterprises to small startups, to be able to program biology to address some of our times' most pressing challenges, such as climate change, pollution, and finding cures for various diseases.
"It's incredible to think that, thanks to our technology, biologists are going to be able to provide new medicines faster, replace materials based on hydrocarbons with biological alternatives, and create cultured meat to free up arable land."
—Stef van Grieken, Founder and CEO, Cradle"Until now, designing a new protein-based product typically required hundreds of millions of dollars. Our platform democratizes this process, allowing even smaller startups to test new ideas faster and more cost-effectively. We're revolutionizing the development process across multiple industries. And thanks to our partnership with Ginkgo Bioworks, users no longer need their own lab facilities, further lowering barriers to entry," enthuses Stef. "It's incredible to think that our technology will enable biologists to develop new medicines more quickly, replace hydrocarbon- or animal-based products with more sustainable alternatives, and create cultured meat to reduce the strain on arable land."
With its clear ambitions and transformative potential, Cradle is poised to redefine the traditional paradigms of biological research by pushing the boundaries of science. The company is paving the way for a new era in which AI-supported research, conducted in a secure environment, can accelerate solutions to the biggest challenges facing society.
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About Cradle
Founded in 2021, Cradle is a biotechnology startup that uses AI to revolutionize protein engineering. Their innovative platform enables faster, more cost-effective development of novel, high-performing proteins for various industries, including pharmaceuticals, chemicals, food, and agriculture. With a team of approximately 40 experts based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and Zurich, Switzerland, Cradle is dedicated to making protein engineering accessible and efficient for research and development teams worldwide.