Ridge Bio Secures $25M Seed for AI-Enabled Drug Design

Ridge Biotechnologies, a Palo Alto-based startup, emerged from stealth with $25 million in oversubscribed seed financing. Sutter Hill Ventures incubated Ridge Bio and led the round. Overlap Holdings also participated in this funding.

Ridge Bio pioneers enzyme and targeted drug design, powering the next wave of precision medicine. The company leverages proprietary machine learning models and high-throughput, cell-free experimentation. This advanced approach enables a new class of precisely engineered enzyme-based therapeutics, central to AI-enabled drug design.

Advancing Precision Therapeutics with AI

The Ridge Bio platform applies its technology across various applications, including antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs) and in vivo CAR-T therapies. Its initial offerings include NativeLink enzymes and ProTrigger linkers. NativeLink enzymes modify therapeutic proteins site-specifically, while ProTrigger linkers are AI-designed prodrug systems for targeted payload release.

Ridge Bio also announced a collaboration with a leading ADC-focused biotech. This partnership utilizes ProTrigger and NativeLink product lines.

Weston Kightlinger, PhD, co-founded and leads Ridge Bio as CEO. He previously co-founded SwiftScale Biologics, acquired by Resilience. The company's advisory board includes Nobel Laureate Carolyn Bertozzi, PhD, and Stanford Professor Mike Jewett, PhD.