Forbes November 19, 2025
Profluent has raised $106 million to scale up use of its AI models for biology in drug development and agriculture.
li Madani started thinking about how AI could be programmed for biology in 2020, years before the launch of ChatGPT. The machine learning scientist was working at Salesforce, which that year launched a moonshot project, called ProGen, to design novel proteins with generative AI. “The same architecture used for English, you can use for biological languages like proteins,” he told Forbes.
He left Salesforce in 2022 and teamed up with Alexander Meeske, head of a research lab at the University of Washington, to bring that promise to life. Now, his Emeryville, California-based startup Profluent’s AI models enable scientists to explain...
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