Perceptic, a London, UK-based developer of an infrastructure-agnostic end-to-end AI operating system for drug discovery, raised $12 million in seed funding led by Accel, with participation from Air Street Capital and Elder Gull.
Perceptic said its software is already being used by multiple top-tier pharmaceutical companies, including CSL, the Australian biotechnology company.
With fresh funds, Perceptic is targeting three areas of pharma R&D. The first is scouting external assets that biotechnology companies have developed and that big pharma companies look to license. The startup says its system can compress the scientific due diligence needed to assess these drug candidates from weeks to hours.
The second area where Perceptic is focusing is helping pharma companies choose which indications to pursue in clinical trials, a decision that Flock said can swing the fate of investments worth millions of dollars.
The third is building a “data foundation” for clinical trial design, which the company says has produced a 50-fold increase in clinical data extractions.
Tilman Flock, Perceptic’s co-founder and CEO, is a bioscience researcher who spent nearly seven years at Palantir, building the company’s commercial AI platform and helping life sciences companies use it.
He told Fortune that most AI startups targeting drug development have focused on improving just one particular part of the complex process, such as predicting protein structures, or looking for a molecule that will bind with a particular site on a target protein, or trying to optimize the recruitment of patients for clinical trials. Perceptic, by contrast, is pitching itself as the “connective tissue” between those discrete AI tools and the proprietary internal and external data that pharmaceutical companies use to make decisions.
Digital health companies have secured more than $180 billion in funding to date, according to our recent Funding Database.
More recently, Forus (formerly Tandem), a developer of an AI-powered prior authorizations platform that connects doctors, pharmacies, payers, and biopharma to bring new medicine to patients, raised over $160 million in funding at a valuation of $1 billion.
In another deal, Dandelion Health, a provider of a clinical intelligence platform for life sciences that powers the next generation of diagnosis and treatments, raised $14 million in a Series A funding round led by Healthier Capital, with participation from Colle Capital and existing investors Primary Venture Partners, Moxxie Ventures, and Convergent Ventures.