AI Biology Startup EvolutionaryScale Announces $142M Seed Financing

Gunderson Dettmer represented client EvolutionaryScale, a startup building AI models for use in biological research, in its $142 million Seed financing led by investors Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross, and Lux Capital. Founded by former Meta AI researchers, EvolutionaryScale also announced ESM3, a frontier language model that can reason across sequence, structure and function to generate new proteins. With participation from Amazon Web Services (AWS) and NVentures (NVIDIA’s venture capital arm), the new capital poises EvolutionaryScale to make significant strides in applying AI to solve complex biological challenges.

In the announcement of the transaction, EvolutionaryScale co-founder and chief scientist Alexander Rives said, “ESM3 takes a step toward a future of biology where AI is a tool to engineer from first principles, the way we engineer structures, machines, and microchips and write computer programs.”

The Gunderson Dettmer deal team was led by Melissa Marks and included Aaron Rubin, Caroline Ceriello, Kian Khajooei and Erica Davis.

Companies
EvolutionaryScale
Lux Capital