Proactive Investors - EvolutionaryScale, an AI startup focused on biology led by former Meta (NASDAQ:META) Platforms Inc (NASDAQ:META, ETR:FB2A, SWX:FB) employees, on Tuesday launched its milestone AI model ESM3, a generative model capable of generating new proteins.
The company said ESM3 generated a new Green Fluorescent Protein, a process which would naturally take 500 million years of evolution to occur.
It was trained with 1 trillion teraflops on a dataset of 2.78 billion proteins.
“ESM3 takes a step toward a future of biology where AI is a tool to engineer from first principles, the way we engineer structures, machines, and microchips, and write computer programs,” EvolutionaryScale co-founder and chief scientist Alexander Rives said in a statement.
“We’ve been working on this for a long time, and we’re excited to share it with the scientific community and see what they do with it.”
Rives formerly worked at Meta’s FAIR (Fundamental AI Research) Unit. He started EvolutionaryScale in July 2023 with a group of his former Meta coworkers to continue their work building large language models that can generate new proteins.
The company said starting Tuesday it would be opening up an API for closed beta and code weights are available for a small open version of ESM3 for non-commercial use.
It has also partnered with Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) Web Services (AWS) and NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA) to make the new AI model available to their select customers, EvolutionaryScale said.
Working with AWS will allow hundreds of thousands of researchers globally and nine of the top 10 pharma companies that already use AWS’ generative AI and health services to access the model, the company noted.
EvolutionaryScale also announced on Tuesday that it has raised $142 million in seed funding.
The seed funding round was led by Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross and Lux Capital, with AWS, NVIDIA’s venture capital arm NVentures, and angel investors also participating.
The company said the funding would be used to expand the capabilities of its models.