AI Biotech Startup Profluent Lands $106 million Co-led by Jeff Bezos and Altimeter

Berkeley, California-based Profluent has secured $106 million in fresh funding, a raise that places the AI-driven biotech startup on a sharper trajectory as it pushes toward its ambition of making biology programmable. The round, co-led by Altimeter Capital and Bezos Expeditions, lifts the company’s total capital to roughly $150 million – a number that reflects growing investor confidence in AI’s role in rewriting the future of protein science.

Instead of following the traditional path of biological discovery, Profluent is attempting something more direct: designing new proteins on demand using frontier-scale AI models. The company’s systems can take natural-language prompts, simple descriptions of what a scientist wants a protein to do, and generate corresponding DNA sequences. The approach leans heavily on a massive dataset the company has assembled, including a “Protein Atlas” with more than 115 billion protein sequences. It is one of the largest private biological datasets known in the industry.

Some of Profluent’s momentum comes from an early breakthrough. The company demonstrated that scaling laws—the same principles that helped supercharge large language models in tech—also hold true in protein design. As the models grow and data scale increases, the ability to generate complex, functional proteins improves dramatically. For biotech leaders watching AI reshape their sector, this was a turning point.

The company’s open-source genome editor, OpenCRISPR-1, has already attracted interest from researchers, pharmaceutical teams, and biotech partners. While genome editing brought Profluent early attention, the startup has since moved into other biologic formats, including enzymes, antibodies, and antigens. The expansion hints at Profluent’s strategy to become a foundational layer for next-generation biological engineering.

“With this funding, we are accelerating the path from lab breakthroughs to real-world applications, creating bespoke proteins to solve challenges in human health and the environment,” said Ali Madani, Ph.D., Profluent co-founder and Chief Executive Officer. “Partners are already deploying our technology while our R&D efforts are rapidly expanding the range and depth of our design capabilities. This capital enables Profluent to expand our platform’s capabilities, expand markets, and bring abundance to therapeutics, agriculture, and biomanufacturing.”

“Profluent combines world-class AI, biology and therapeutic development expertise against the backdrop of thriving scaling laws,” said Jamin Ball, partner at Altimeter Capital. “This positions them not just as a frontier science company, but as the foundation of a massive new industry. Programmable biology opens the largest design space in nature and reaches into multi-trillion-dollar markets, and Profluent is only at the beginning of exploring it.”

Investors share the enthusiasm, though with different reasons. Some see programmable biology as a multi-trillion-dollar opportunity; others view it as an inevitable convergence of AI and life sciences. Either way, the timing of the raise suggests the sector is accelerating rather than cooling.

About Bezos Expeditions

Bezos Expeditions, the personal investment office of Jeff Bezos, operates from Mercer Island, Washington. Established in 2005, the firm manages Bezos’s private investments across sectors that range from biotech to AI, consumer technology, and space exploration. Its portfolio includes well-known companies such as Airbnb, Uber, and Twitter, along with several rapidly rising AI and deep-tech startups.

The firm frequently backs early scientific and technical bets investments that may take years to mature but have the potential to redefine entire industries. Its participation in Profluent’s latest round adds to a growing list of moves that signal an increasing interest in AI-driven life sciences.

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