Tilman Flock, Martin Copes and Zaki Trache cofounded Perceptic, which has a presence in London and Basel, after working together at Palantir. The trio collaborated on Palantir’s AI platform and life sciences activities, giving them experience of securely connecting artificial intelligence models to organizations’ internal data and operations. Flock, Copes and Trache are applying that experience to Perceptic.
Many AI startups address specific R&D tasks, such as identifying drug binding sites, and use their tools to discover and develop their own molecules. Perceptic, in contrast, has developed software to help other companies connect data, decisions and context across the drug lifecycle.
Building an OS for biopharma
Pitched as a way to unify asset scouting, scientific evaluation and clinical data foundations, the platform brings together evidence from internal records, publications, clinical history and competitive intelligence. Companies use their own data, hardware and AI models.
Nathan Benaich, general partner of Perceptic investor Air Street Capital, outlined a use case. A pharma company evaluating a new therapeutic area could use the platform to test a hypothesis against its data. The action would trigger a tool that assesses and ranks external assets. Back in the platform, another tool would find the molecules’ trial histories, benchmarks and endpoint precedents.
Accel, a venture capital fund that led the seed round with Air Street and Elder Gull, quantified some of the benefits of the platform. In live deployments, the platform has reportedly enabled companies to go from screening hundreds of assets a week to screening thousands of assets in minutes. Scientific due diligence has been cut from weeks to hours, Accel said, and clinical data extractions have risen 50-fold.
The timelines involved in drug development mean it could take years for companies to show whether the claimed benefits translate into the more efficient progression of safe and effective drugs to patients. However, Perceptic has already shown enough promise to persuade companies to look at its platform. Benaich said CSL and multiple unnamed top-20 pharma companies have deployed the platform.
Raising the seed round positions Perceptic to continue working to improve the platform, win clients and hire staff. The company is recruiting for five product development and two commercial positions, all of which are based in London.
The city is emerging as a hub for companies applying AI to the biopharma industry, with Isomorphic Labs recently raising $2.1 billion (€1.8 billion) from its London base and Boehringer Ingelheim launching an AI center.