A new startup founded by a former Google DeepMind scientist is exiting stealth with $50 million in funding. Latent Labs is building AI foundation models to “make biology programmable,” and it plans to partner with biotech and pharmaceutical companies to generate and optimize proteins.

Isomorphic Labs, a spin-off from DeepMind, is applying AI-first principles to drug discovery rather than just protein structure prediction. While its roots lie in AlphaFold, the company’s focus extends beyond structure determination – modeling how molecules interact to accelerate drug design.

The company is developing generative AI methods to design proteins from scratch, with applications in drug discovery and biotechnology.

Latent Labs is led by CEO Simon Kohl, who previously worked at Google parent Alphabet Inc.’s DeepMind machine learning lab. He was part of the team that developed DeepMind’s groundbreaking AlphaFold2 neural network.