Profluent Bio

Type: Company (AI-driven biotechnology) Founded/Led by: Ali Madani (prior Salesforce AI research)

Profluent built the first protein language model system capable of designing functional gene editors from scratch. Their flagship is OpenCRISPR-1, published in Nature (July 2025) and publicly released in April 2024 — the world's first successful human-genome editing by an entirely AI-designed system (nuclease + guide RNA + deaminase all generated).

The company's thesis is that protein language models trained on evolutionary diversity can design functional biomolecules in any family with enough training data. CRISPR is the first proof; the platform generalizes.

Key Contributions

• OpenCRISPR-1 — first fully AI-designed CRISPR editor to edit the human genome. 55.7% on-target, 0.32% off-target (95% reduction vs SpCas9). (OpenCRISPR-1 paper)
• CRISPR-Cas Atlas — 5.1M CRISPR-Cas proteins, 2.7× expansion of known natural diversity. The largest curated CRISPR dataset assembled. (OpenCRISPR-1 paper)
• Open-source precedent — released OpenCRISPR-1 publicly in April 2024, before Nature publication. (OpenCRISPR-1 paper)
• $106M raise (Nov 2025) — market validation of the generative-biology platform thesis. (OpenCRISPR-1 paper)

Mentioned In

• AI-Designed Biology — Profluent is the flagship case study

Related Entities

• Broad Institute — the traditional CRISPR R&D center; Profluent's AI-design model is a parallel approach
• Stanford Medicine — Stanford's CRISPR-GPT is the copilot complement to Profluent's generative approach