- London-based Perceptic has emerged from stealth with a $12M seed round led by Accel to build a single AI platform that follows a drug from early discovery through clinical development, a workflow currently handled by disconnected systems across most pharma companies.
- The founders built Palantir’s AIP product and its Life Sciences practice, and already have paid production deployments running across multiple top-tier pharma companies including CSL.
- The global AI in drug discovery market stood at $1.72B in 2024 and is projected to surpass $8.5B by 2030, growing at over 30% annually.
A drug approved today took more than a decade to reach patients and cost upwards of $2 billion to develop. It also ran on fragmented systems that barely communicate with each other – research insights disappearing between teams, clinical data sitting in disconnected silos, and billion-dollar decisions depending on manually stitching together incomplete information. Three people who spent years inside Palantir building production AI for the world’s most complex enterprises decided that was the problem worth solving.
Perceptic, founded in London in 2024 by Tilman Flock, Martin Copes, and Zaki Trache, has emerged from stealth with a $12M seed round led by Accel, alongside Air Street Capital and Elder Gull. All three founders were key engineers on Palantir’s AIP product and central to shaping its Life Sciences practice, a pedigree that has become a reliable signal for investors backing enterprise AI spinouts. The company employs around 20 people.
What it does and why most pharma AI tools miss the point
Perceptic builds a shared intelligence layer that connects the full drug development lifecycle, asset scouting, scientific evaluation, indication selection, and clinical data analysis into a single operational system. Most pharma AI platforms today address one stage in isolation: a copilot for literature review here, a tool for clinical trial design there. Perceptic’s architecture is designed so that every insight from discovery compounds into later decisions rather than dying at the next departmental handoff.
The platform uses AI agents tuned to different data types, public knowledge such as patents and literature, internal proprietary research, and external purchased datasets to harmonise all three into one decision-making surface. Customers currently use it to compress scientific due diligence from weeks to hours, scale asset screening from hundreds of compounds per week to thousands per minute, and achieve a 50-fold increase in clinical data extractions. The company is already in paid production deployments across multiple top-tier pharma companies, biotechs, and CROs, the only named customer is CSL, the Australian biotechnology company.
Flock said, “Too many critical drug development decisions still happen without a complete view of the evidence. Perceptic connects data, context, and decision-making so every insight compounds instead of dying at the next handoff.”
The investors
Accel, the London-headquartered firm with a portfolio spanning Spotify, Monzo, Slack, and Dropbox, led the round.Sonali De Rycker, Partner at Accel, tracked the founding team while they were still at Palantir and invested roughly a year after their first meeting, by which point Perceptic had moved beyond pilots into paid production. De Rycker, who also led Accel’s recent $100M healthcare AI bet on Tandem, said: “Perceptic is the first solution that follows the drug rather than the department. The founders combine deep life sciences expertise with real experience deploying AI at scale.”
Nathan Benaich, Founder and General Partner of Air Street Capital, added, “Pharma’s next R&D leap will come from the operating system connecting data, decisions, and context across the entire drug development process. The category is forming around Perceptic.”
The competitive landscape
The AI drug discovery market is consolidating fast.Isomorphic Labs, the Google DeepMind spinout focused on AI-driven molecule design, closed a $2.1B Series B in May 2026 led by Thrive Capital, with Alphabet, GV, Temasek, and the UK Sovereign AI Fund also participating, the largest AI drug discovery raise in European history.
Insilico Medicine, which focuses on generative AI for molecule discovery, raised $110M in a Series E in March 2025 and followed it with a $2.75B deal with Eli Lilly in March 2026 for a portfolio of AI-generated preclinical drug candidates. Both companies are building deep inside a single stage of the pipeline, molecule generation and design. Perceptic is not competing for that ground. It is building the connective tissue between stages, betting that the intelligence layer coordinating decisions across the full lifecycle is a distinct and defensible category from the models generating individual outputs.
The global AI in drug discovery market stood at $1.72B in 2024 and is projected to surpass $8.5B by 2030, growing at over 30% annually. As Europe’s healthtech and AI sectors raised $13.9B in Q1 2025 alone, the $12M in seed funding goes toward engineering hires and expanding existing deployments.
The unanswered question for Perceptic — and for pharma AI broadly — is whether the large pharma companies currently buying point solutions for individual workflows will consolidate onto a single operating system, or whether the organisational structure of drug development itself, built around departments rather than drugs, will resist the platform logic that Perceptic is betting the industry will eventually demand.
