Diffuse Bio is a protein design company headquartered in San Carlos, California, building generative AI models to engineer new proteins with control over structure and function. Its first foundation model, Diffuse StructGen-1 (DSG-1), was prompted to design nanobody binders and the company reported designs that bound their target at a 3% hit rate, with strong binders in the sub-10 nM range. The company has since released RamaX and RamaX Opt for binder design and affinity maturation, publishing a case study reporting more than 1,000-fold tighter binders produced in one week, and ProxyTm, a method for measuring protein thermostability at scale. Its DiffuseSandbox product provides browser-based access to the models for end-to-end binder design, and the company supports scaled-up design through an API. Diffuse Bio combines model development with proprietary assay development and data generation in-house, using the resulting experimental data to train subsequent models, and states it measures performance through computational benchmarks, internal case studies and partner commercial goals. Its research has been published in Nature and featured in the New York Times.
Funding
Diffuse Bio's investors include Fellows Fund, which publicly announced a strategic investment in the company in 2024 after backing it a year earlier. Round sizes, dates and total capital raised have not been publicly disclosed.