June 25 - EvolutionaryScale, an artificial intelligence

startup focused on biology, said Tuesday it had raised $142

million in seed funding, led by Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross and

Lux Capital.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and the venture capital

arm of NVIDIA ( NVDA ) also participated in the fund raising.

Calling it a "ChatGPT moment for biology," Lux Capital

co-founder and managing partner Josh Wolfe told Reuters the

company has developed the first large language model for

creating novel proteins and other biological systems.

EvolutionaryScale envisions its AI being utilized for a wide

range of applications, from accelerating drug discovery to

engineering microbes capable of breaking down plastic in the

environment, the company's chief scientist Alex Rives told

Reuters.

Using AI to engineer new biological systems is currently an

area of intense interest.

Microsoft ( MSFT )-backed OpenAI announced a partnership

with French drugmaker Sanofi in May to boost its drug

development projects using AI.

At the same time, experts have also raised alarm bells about

generative AI's potential to help create bioweapons, through

aiding the development of harmful pathogens or toxins.

EvolutionaryScale's funding will be used to train its next

generation of AI models as well as build out a team to partner

with the biotech industry, Rives said.

The company is releasing models named ESM3. The smaller ESM3

model is being open sourced for non-commercial research, and AWS

and NVIDIA ( NVDA ) will make the models available commercially,

including its largest ESM3 model, the company said.

The company said it leveraged ESM3 to engineer a novel

fluorescent protein that diverged from the evolutionary path of

naturally occurring fluorescent proteins, which would have taken

nature about 500 million years to evolve.

(Reporting by Anna Tong in San Francisco; Editing by Lincoln

Feast.)