Our Vision & Story
Prolific co-founders Max Huisman, CTO, Deniz Kent, CEO, and Declan Jones, CIO
Prolific is on a mission to illuminate biology’s limitless potential for a healthier, more sustainable tomorrow. We have cultivated some of the brightest minds in biology to enable better therapeutics and advanced nutrition. While our mission is ambitious, we know it’s possible because of the incredible people behind it.
Our Story
Founded in 2020 by our co-founders, Deniz Kent, Max Huisman, and Declan Jones — Prolific Machines was formed through a shared passion to make cultured meat a reality. From our early beginnings in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district, we have grown from a small group of early believers to a diverse team of experts located in our Emeryville, CA headquarters. We spent four years creating and proving our technology. And through the process of developing our genetic tools, we realized the impact potential of what we were building extended far beyond cultured meat. In 2024, we widened the reach of our platform to deliver far-reaching solutions, from food to pharmaceuticals.
Currently, our team is focused on addressing complex biopharmaceutical challenges that our Photomolecular platform is uniquely suited to solve. These include enabling the production of difficult to produce protein therapeutics and increasing global accessibility to antibodies. We offer pre-clinical development services, with in-house cell line development capabilities to 200-liter pilot production scale.
Prolific’s History
Christina Perry joins as CFO, coming to Prolific from Forge Biologics after leading a successful strategic acquisition of the company by Ajinomoto Co.
Driven by customer feedback and compelling data, the team hones their focus to leverage optogenetics to power diverse solutions across the biopharmaceutical industry.
Prolific closes a $55.5 million Series B1 and debuts its technology to the world after a four-year R&D focused period.
Prolific receives a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to develop an antibody therapeutics platform that improves global accessibility to lifesaving drugs in low- and middle-income countries.
Prolific’s Photomolecular platform is recognized as one of TIME’s Best Inventions.
Prolific completes construction on its pilot facilities at its Emeryville Headquarters, unlocking 200-liter production capacity — the world’s largest optogenetics scale to date!
The world’s first meatball growth with light is produced. This marvel outcompetes animal- and plant-based meatballs in blind taste tests and is a delicious proof-point for Prolific’s tech.
The team relocates to its current Emeryville Headquarters, which was once the original Jelly Belly distribution center.
Prolific closes the fastest Seed round and Series A in IndieBio history, providing funds to develop and prove its technology.
Prolific officially founded in April of 2020, just two months after the start of the global pandemic. Prolific is accepted to the IndieBio Startup Accelerator and the founders relocate to San Francisco to bring their idea to life.
Deniz recruits co-founder Max Huisman as CTO to lead Prolific’s hardware and engineering and Declan Jones as CIO to lead machine learning and closed-loop control efforts.
Deniz Kent, Declan Jones, and Max Huisman come together to discuss an idea for an optogenetics company. They start working on building a business case and pitch to accelerators.
Deniz Kent has light bulb moment to harness optogenetics in a biomanufacturing context while completing his PhD in Stem Cell biology at Kings College in London.