Former Palantir Executives Launch Perceptic With $12 Million Seed Round

Three former Palantir executives have founded Perceptic, a startup building an end-to-end AI platform that covers drug discovery through clinical trial design. The company emerged from stealth and announced a $12 million seed round. London-based venture firm Accel led the round, with participation from Air Street Capital and Elder Gull. The valuation was not disclosed.

Perceptic said its software is already deployed at multiple top-tier pharmaceutical companies, naming only CSL, the Australian biotechnology firm, as a customer. The platform is described as infrastructure and model agnostic, allowing clients to integrate their own data, hardware, and AI models.

Tilman Flock, Perceptic’s cofounder and CEO, said the system acts as “connective tissue” between existing AI tools and the proprietary data sets pharma companies rely on. He added that the company’s “AI workers” trace every output back to its source data to avoid hallucinations.

De Rycker, the Accel partner who led the investment, said the firm began tracking Flock and co-founders Martin Copes and Zaki Trache while they were still at Palantir. The firm invested roughly a year after the founders left, once Perceptic had moved from pilots to paid production deployments.

Flock said the company now employs about 20 people, most of them engineers in London. The bulk of the seed capital will be used to expand engineering and the customer base.

Perceptic is targeting three areas: scouting external drug assets for licensing, selecting clinical-trial indications, and building data foundations for trial design. The company claims its clinical-data extraction tools have produced a 50-fold increase in speed.

Nathan Benaich, founder and general partner of Air Street Capital, said in a statement that pharma’s next R&D gains will come from operating systems that connect data and decisions across a 15-year process rather than from additional point tools.