The optimistic case for protein foundation model companies

Let’s be honest with each other: the funding for protein foundation model startups got a little crazy for a moment. EvolutionaryScale got $142M in mid-2024, Latent Labs got $50M in early-2025, Chai Discovery got $70M in mid-2025. And, of course, the giant two: Isomorphic Labs with $600M in funding in early 2025, and Xaira Therapeutics with an insane $1B in funding in mid-2024. Things have calmed down since then, so I think it’s a good moment to look back at this with some fresh eyes and ask: was any of this a good idea? It’s become quite common to tell one another that no, obviously not, these were a series of escalating, FOMO-y investments that had basically zero basis in objective reality. I empathize with this viewpoint. Protein models are increasingly recognized as commoditized things, where the open-source stuff is actually quite good, and, even at the private level, there didn’t seem to be a strong differentiation between one group’s pretrained weights and another’s. If you reall

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• Luka Milos