Perceptic closes £8.9m growth round led by Air Street Capital with Accel
This article covers Perceptic, a biotech startup, which has closed a £8.9m growth funding round led by Air Street Capital with participation from Accel and angel investors. The funding is intended to accelerate deployment of its AI operating system across drug development workflows, targeting integration of research, development and clinical decision-making for pharmaceutical R&D.
Perceptic, a biotech startup, has closed a £8.9m growth funding round led by Air Street Capital with participation from Accel and angel investors, in a deal the company says will accelerate deployment of its AI operating system across drug development workflows. The funding matters because Perceptic aims to connect research, development and clinical decision-making with an AI layer that its backers argue can reduce the time and friction of evaluating assets and extracting clinical evidence.
Why it matters
Drug discovery remains slow, costly and fragmented across data sources and teams. Perceptic’s approach is significant because it targets the integration problem — providing a shared intelligence layer that links external asset scouting, in-house research and clinical trial evidence. If the product works at scale, it could change how pharmaceutical companies prioritise programs and reuse institutional knowledge across projects, rather than having insights siloed within individual teams.
The deal also signals investor interest in tooling for drug development, not just novel drug assets, at a time when frontier AI models are increasingly being brought into scientific workflows.
Inside the product
Perceptic runs three applications on a common architecture:
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Scout: triages and ranks external assets — licensing candidates, competitive programmes and pipeline opportunities — against a customer’s evolving strategy. Perceptic claims evaluation time has reduced from a week to an hour in production, and that asset screening throughput has moved from hundreds per week to thousands in minutes.
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PercepticOS: an intelligence layer that sits above a customer’s internal tools and data. It is used to test hypotheses, compare internal evidence with external benchmarks and build a persistent knowledge base that carries across projects.
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Atlas: a clinical data foundation that harmonises internal and external trial data. Live deployments are said to have produced a 50-fold increase in clinical data extraction.
Perceptic pitches itself not as a point tool but as an instance that learns an organisation’s tools and decisions, with value compounding over time as it follows a drug through discovery and development rather than remaining tied to a single department.
Who are the investors?
Air Street Capital led the round with participation from Accel and unnamed angel investors. Air Street is known for investing in AI-first techbio companies and has a portfolio that includes Profluent (AI tools for protein design), Allcyte (cell-based screening, acquired by Exscientia) and Valence Discovery (drug discovery technology, acquired by Recursion). These examples show Air Street’s focus on companies that use computational approaches to accelerate drug research; Perceptic represents a bet on infrastructure software rather than on individual drug assets.
In the announcement, Nathan, an investor at Air Street Capital, said:
As an investor I am generally of the view that the money is in the drug, not the tools. Perceptic is the exception. The moment has come to bet on the AI-first software layer, and the right team has shown up to build it.
In the announcement, Nathan, an investor at Air Street Capital, said:
Congratulations to Tilman, Martin, Zaki and the whole Perceptic team. We’re proud to be on the journey.
If you're researching potential backers in this space:
- Explore our list of biotech venture capital firms in the UK
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Founder perspective
Perceptic’s founding team — Tilman, Martin and Zaki — previously worked on Palantir’s AIP product and the company’s Life Sciences practice. That background combines experience shipping production AI into regulated, data-sensitive enterprises with hands-on knowledge of pharma workflows. The team emphasises the operational challenges of deploying frontier models in multi-stakeholder R&D environments and the practical requirements of security and integration that large pharmaceutical customers demand.
Perceptic says it has live deployments with CSL and multiple top-20 pharma companies that were running the software before the company emerged from stealth, which the company frames as an early validation of both product-market fit and enterprise readiness.
The bigger picture
Perceptic’s raise sits at the intersection of two trends: rapid advances in foundation models and growing demand from pharma for software that tames the complexity of drug development. Attention from major labs and collaborations between AI developers and life sciences firms have sharpened interest in tools that can reliably feed evidence into high-stakes decisions.
For the UK and European ecosystem, the deal highlights continued investor appetite for companies building infrastructure for biotech R&D, alongside funding for therapeutics themselves. If software layers like Perceptic can demonstrably shorten evaluation cycles and improve reuse of clinical evidence, they may become an increasingly common feature of biotech R&D stacks across the region.
They've invested in Perceptic
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