Today, the first IPD spin out company Cyrus Biotechnology announced the closing of an $8M total Series A financing. The investment was led by Trinity Ventures, with participation from OrbiMed Advisors, SpringRock Ventures, W Fund, WRF Capital (a major supporter of the IPD), and individual investors. Congratulations Cyrus team!
Cyrus is commercializing Cyrus Bench® an innovative user friendly software as a service (SaaS) cloud computing solution for distribution of the powerful “Rosetta” protein structure prediction and design algorithms.
See news in Geekwire, BusinessWire.
The company’s name was inspired by Cyrus Levinthal’s famous paradox, that most small proteins fold spontaneously on short time scales of less than a millisecond, despite there being are a very large number of degrees of freedom in an unfolded protein chain of amino acids, leading to an astronomical number of possible conformations that may need to be sampled before folding into a low energy conformation. The Rosetta suite of algorithms that originated over 17 years ago at the UW, now with a team of over 100+ programmers contributing to the Rosetta Commons, in many cases solves Levinthal’s paradox.
In the last 9 months IPD / Baker lab related Seattle area spin out companies have raised in excess of $55 million to commercialize innovations in computational protein modeling and design !
The $8M Series A investment in Cyrus, The $12 M Series A investment in Arzeda, and the $35 M direct-to-pharma deal of PvP Biologics with Takeda.
