Perceptic, an AI-driven drug discovery startup for major pharma, exits stealth mode and secures $12 million seed round

(SeaPRwire) –   Perceptic, a new startup founded by a trio of former Palantir executives who were instrumental in the company’s Life Sciences practice, has officially launched. The company is developing a comprehensive AI platform designed to streamline the entire drug development process, from initial discovery through to clinical trial design. Today marks Perceptic’s emergence from stealth mode, accompanied by the announcement of a $12 million seed funding round.

The seed funding round was spearheaded by London-based venture capital firm Accel, with participation from Air Street Capital and Elder Gull. The company’s valuation post-funding has not been disclosed.

Perceptic has revealed that its software is already in use by several leading pharmaceutical companies, although it was only permitted to name Australian biotechnology firm CSL.

The past two years have seen a surge in startups leveraging AI to accelerate drug discovery, including notable companies like Isomorphic (a spin-out from Google DeepMind), robotic lab innovator Recursion, and Insilico Medicine. However, the absence of any AI-discovered drugs successfully navigating human clinical trials and receiving market approval has led to skepticism regarding AI’s transformative potential in drug development.

Tilman Flock, co-founder and CEO of Perceptic, a bioscience researcher with nearly seven years at Palantir where he built the company’s commercial AI platform and assisted life sciences clients, explained that most AI startups in drug development have concentrated on optimizing specific stages of the complex process, such as predicting protein structures, identifying molecules that bind to target proteins, or improving patient recruitment for clinical trials. In contrast, Perceptic positions itself as the “connective tissue” that integrates these specialized AI tools with the proprietary internal and external data that pharmaceutical companies rely on for decision-making.

“For years, the industry has tried to improve each part of the [drug discovery] process separately, but that’s a linear process where insight dies at every handoff,” Flock stated.

Flock further elaborated that Perceptic’s platform is “infrastructure and model agnostic,” enabling clients to integrate their own data, hardware, and AI models, with Perceptic serving as the unifying layer.

Perceptic is focusing on three key areas within pharmaceutical R&D. The first involves scouting external assets developed by biotechnology companies that large pharmaceutical firms may wish to license. The startup claims its system can reduce the scientific due diligence required for assessing these drug candidates from weeks to mere hours.

The second area of focus is assisting pharmaceutical companies in selecting which indications to pursue in clinical trials, a decision Flock noted can significantly impact investments worth millions of dollars.

The third area involves establishing a “data foundation” for clinical trial design, which the company reports has led to a 50-fold increase in clinical data extractions.

Sonali De Rycker, the Accel partner who led the investment, expressed her conviction in Perceptic’s software, highlighting its ability to “follow the drug” throughout its entire development lifecycle, rather than being confined to a specific departmental silo within a large pharmaceutical company. “From the point at which you have hypothesis and evidence all the way to when you’re designing the clinical trial, and everything you do in between … it makes no sense for it to be siloed,” she commented.

De Rycker mentioned that Accel had been monitoring Flock and his co-founders, Martin Copes and Zaki Trache, during their tenure at Palantir, where they were key engineers on AIP. The firm met with them shortly after their departure. Accel’s investment occurred approximately a year after this initial meeting, by which time Perceptic had progressed from pilot programs to paid production deployments. The team has since expanded to around 20 employees, according to Flock.

Flock explained that pharmaceutical companies typically utilize three categories of data: public knowledge, such as patents and literature; internal proprietary data accumulated over years of research and clinical trials; and external datasets acquired from consultants and data vendors. Perceptic is capable of harmonizing all three types of data. The system employs “AI workers,” or AI agents, specifically tuned to different data types to identify insights or optimizations.

Flock emphasized that pharmaceutical clients require certainty regarding the origin of any data used in decision-making, making them intolerant of AI hallucinations, where an AI model fabricates or misrepresents information. Perceptic’s AI system provides customers with the ability to trace every claim back to its source.

De Rycker observed that Perceptic’s approach aligns with a broader trend in enterprise AI, where platforms are increasingly unifying workflows and data across multiple departments, moving beyond standalone tools. She added that these platforms can function as a “new source of truth,” potentially superseding or at least diminishing the prominence of traditional databases and enterprise resource planning software.

She also suggested that Perceptic has a strong potential for success originating from Europe, given the concentration of pharmaceutical talent in Switzerland and the UK. The majority of the company’s engineering operations are based in London, drawing on Palantir alumni, while many of its clients are in the United States, where Perceptic intends to expand its presence.

Nathan Benaich, founder and general partner of Air Street Capital, stated that the next significant advancement in pharma R&D will not stem from numerous incremental tools or cutting-edge models alone, but rather from an operating system that “connects data, decisions, and context across a 15-year process.”

Flock indicated that the majority of the seed funding will be allocated to engineering efforts and expanding Perceptic’s customer base. “We’re far beyond product-market fit,” he said. “It’s about scaling out.”