What if creating a new medicine was as simple as running a computer program? That’s the idea driving Latent Labs, a London-based artificial intelligence start-up that wants to make biology programmable. The company recently emerged from stealth mode with $50 million in funding and a bold mission to transform how scientists design drugs, enzymes, and entire biological systems.
Founded by Dr Simon Kohl, a former DeepMind researcher who helped develop the Nobel Prize-winning AlphaFold2 model, Latent Labs believes generative AI can do more than analyse biology, it can create it.
What is Latent Labs?
Latent Labs is a frontier AI lab working at the intersection of biology and computation. Its mission is simple yet ambitious: to make biology programmable, turning the process of designing new molecules into a digital, automated task.
The company operates from offices in London and San Francisco, positioning itself at the heart of both Europe’s and Silicon Valley’s innovation hubs. Founded in 2020, Latent Labs stayed under the radar for several years before revealing its work publicly in early 2025. The company unveiled its flagship platform, Latent-X, alongside its funding announcement.
Latent Labs’ vision is to allow scientists to use AI to design new antibodies, enzymes, and therapeutic molecules directly on a computer. In other words, rather than relying on natural evolution or laboratory trial and error, researchers can now engineer biology through computation.
What Does Latent Labs Do?
The Technology Behind Latent Labs
At the core of Latent Labs’ innovation is its Latent-X platform, a generative AI system designed for de novo protein design. This means it can create completely new proteins from scratch, designed for specific biological functions. Traditionally, drug discovery involves screening huge libraries of existing molecules to find one that interacts correctly with a target protein. Latent Labs flips this process by generating tailor-made molecules designed to bind with precision.
This shift dramatically shortens development time. What once took years of laboratory work can now be done in days. Researchers can model, test, and iterate entirely in silico before moving to the wet lab phase.
Why It Matters for Drug Discovery
Drug development is notoriously slow and expensive. Bringing a new treatment to market can take over ten years and cost billions. Latent Labs’ AI-driven approach could cut those timelines and costs by orders of magnitude. By designing antibodies, enzymes, or mini-proteins computationally, scientists can move straight to promising candidates.
It also opens the door to personalised medicine, where treatments are designed for the specific biology of an individual patient. Instead of relying on one-size-fits-all therapies, Latent Labs’ technology could enable bespoke solutions for complex diseases.
The Vision of Dr Simon Kohl
Dr Simon Kohl’s background in AI and biology gives Latent Labs a unique edge. Before founding the company, he was part of DeepMind’s AlphaFold2 project, which solved a 50-year-old problem in biology: predicting the structure of proteins from amino acid sequences. That project laid the foundation for modern protein modelling and inspired Kohl to take the next step, from prediction to creation.
“Our mission is to make biology programmable,” Kohl has said. “We want to move drug discovery fully into the computational realm, where scientists can push a button and design a new molecule that works.”
Under Kohl’s leadership, Latent Labs is developing foundational AI models capable of understanding the complex language of proteins. These models don’t just identify existing molecules; they generate new ones with precise therapeutic potential.
Latent Labs Funding and Investors
Latent Labs’ emergence has drawn significant attention from investors in both AI and biotechnology. Its $50 million total funding includes a $40 million Series A co-led by Radical Ventures and Sofinnova Partners, two leading deep tech and life sciences investment firms. Other participants include Flying Fish, Isomer, and existing backers 8VC, Kindred Capital, and Pillar VC.
Several notable angel investors have also joined the round, including Jeff Dean (Google’s Chief Scientist), Aidan Gomez (Cohere founder and inventor of the Transformer architecture), and Mati Staniszewski (ElevenLabs co-founder). Their involvement highlights the cross-disciplinary appeal of Latent Labs’ mission – blending AI innovation with life sciences.
Investors have described Latent Labs as a pioneer in de novo protein design. According to Aaron Rosenberg of Radical Ventures, the company is achieving something that has never been possible before: designing biology from first principles to create tailor-made therapeutic molecules.
Funding Breakdown and Future Plans
Latent Labs’ funding journey began with a $10 million pre-seed round in 2024, which allowed the company to build early versions of its Latent-X platform and recruit top-tier scientists from DeepMind, Google, and Oxford University. The success of those early results helped attract major venture capital interest.
Its $40 million Series A, announced in February 2025, represents one of the largest early-stage biotech AI fundraises in Europe. The funds are being used to scale Latent-X, expand its London headquarters, and grow partnerships with pharmaceutical companies.
According to the company, the investment will also help fund collaborations in sustainability research, exploring how generative AI can design enzymes that reduce waste and emissions in industrial processes.
Looking ahead, Latent Labs plans to raise additional rounds as it moves toward commercialisation. The company’s roadmap includes opening access to Latent-X for academic labs and biotech start-ups by 2026.
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Applications Beyond Healthcare
While Latent Labs’ immediate focus is on drug discovery, its platform could revolutionise multiple industries. The same generative AI that designs new proteins for medicine can also optimise enzymes used in industrial processes, develop biodegradable materials, or engineer microbes that produce sustainable chemicals.
For example, enzyme optimisation can lead to more efficient biofuel production or reduce waste in food manufacturing. In materials science, AI-designed proteins could help create new biomaterials that replace plastics. By extending its reach beyond healthcare, Latent Labs positions itself as a company that could impact both health and sustainability.
What Makes Latent Labs Different?
The biotech industry is full of AI-driven players, including Isomorphic Labs, Insilico Medicine, and Recursion. Yet Latent Labs stands apart for several reasons:
- Foundational Models for Biology Instead of training narrow AI models for specific proteins or diseases, Latent Labs is building general-purpose models that understand the entire biological landscape. This makes its platform adaptable across countless use cases.
- Collaboration-First Approach Latent Labs does not plan to develop drugs in-house. Instead, it licenses its technology to pharmaceutical and biotech companies, allowing them to integrate the AI platform into their own research pipelines.
- Speed and Scalability Latent-X enables researchers to design, test, and optimise molecules rapidly. The scalability of the technology means that a single lab can run thousands of protein design experiments in silico.
This combination of deep AI capability, accessibility, and flexibility sets Latent Labs apart as a true platform company in the biotech space.
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The Future of Programmable Biology
Generative AI has already changed how we create art, software, and language. Now, biology is next. Latent Labs is among the first companies to apply these methods to living systems, effectively turning biology into an engineering discipline.
In the future, programmable biology could enable scientists to design vaccines in days, create enzymes that break down waste, or develop new materials that grow rather than being manufactured. The impact on healthcare, sustainability, and industry could be transformative.
However, these advances also raise important ethical and regulatory questions. How do we ensure safety when AI designs living systems? How do we regulate ownership of AI-generated biological inventions? Latent Labs is committed to working closely with regulators and research partners to develop responsible frameworks as the field evolves.
Dr Kohl believes that we are at a turning point: “Generative modelling will allow us to go beyond what nature has given us. For the first time, we can design biology intentionally, not just study it.”
FAQs
What is Latent Labs known for? Latent Labs is known for using generative AI to design new proteins and make biology programmable for drug discovery and sustainability applications.
Who founded Latent Labs? Latent Labs was founded by Dr Simon Kohl, a former DeepMind researcher who worked on the AlphaFold2 protein modelling breakthrough.
How much funding has Latent Labs raised? The company has raised $50 million, including a $40 million Series A in early 2025.
Where is Latent Labs based? It is headquartered in London, United Kingdom, with an additional office in San Francisco, United States.
What is Latent-X? Latent-X is Latent Labs’ AI-driven platform that enables scientists to design new proteins, antibodies, and enzymes computationally, reducing reliance on traditional wet-lab experimentation.