Accel

AI has arrived in drug discovery and development, but it hasn’t made it easier. Pharma is one of the most demanding enterprise environments - it doesn’t just need new AI tools, it needs complete mission control. Today, we’re announcing that Accel is leading Perceptic's $12M seed round alongside Air Street Capital and Elder Gull. The Perceptic team is building the AI operating system for the full drug lifecycle and it's set to solve one of the biggest challenges in pharma: silos. Drug discovery and development today remains a multi-year, deeply siloed process. Pharma companies have spent decades accumulating proprietary research, clinical data, and institutional knowledge - yet most of it remains effectively invisible. It lives inside systems that were never designed to talk to each other, accessed by teams that were never designed to collaborate.  Perceptic founders Tilman, Martin, and Zaki's vision was simple: the intelligence needs to follow the drug, not the department. That’s why Perceptic is creating a shared intelligence layer that connects all of these disparate drug discovery processes, ensuring teams have all of the context they need in one place. Clinical decisions are better-informed, asset screening is scaled dramatically, and drug creation is ultimately faster. Top ten pharma companies, biotechs, and CROs - including CSL - are already using it.   Read more from Sonali De Rycker and Cecilia Wang here👇https://lnkd.in/e3WpKnxm

Every layer of the stack is being reimagined and rebuilt. Congratulations to Anthropic, Cognite, Cursor, Cyera, Decagon, Legora, Lovable, Perplexity, and Socure for being named to the CNBC #Disruptor50.

BREAKING: Polish viktor.com has raised a HUGE $75m Series A after hitting $15m revenue run rate within 10 weeks of launch! 🇵🇱 Founded by former Meta engineers Fryd Wiatrowski and Peter Albert, viktor.com is an AI coworker that lives in Slack and Microsoft Teams. It connects to more than 3,000 workplace tools, including Google Drive, Meta Ads, Airtable and Notion, and can be used by anyone in a company through Slack or Teams messages. Today it has announced a huge $75m Series A led by Zhenya Loginov (Partner at Accel), with participation from Bek Ventures, KAYA VC, Inovo.vc and Tenacity Capital. This could well be the largest Series A in Poland (feel free to correct me if I'm wrong Yoram, Orla). The country is having an amazing moment. Congrats to the team 👏

The first wave of AI was chat. The second was coding. We think the third will be driven by omnipresent agents in the workplace. Today, we’re announcing that Accel is leading viktor.com $75M Series A. The Viktor team is building an AI coworker that lives where work already happens: in Slack and Microsoft Teams. That distinction matters. Fryd Wiatrowski and Peter Albert have spent the past two years working toward this moment. Two former Meta engineers, they built through multiple product iterations before Viktor found what every founder hopes for: a product that feels suddenly, obviously right. Just 10 weeks after launch, more than 2,000 organizations use Viktor and the company has reached a $15M revenue run rate. Most AI products are still built for individuals. You open a tool, ask a question, copy the answer, and do the work yourself. Viktor is built for teams. It connects to the systems a company already uses, understands the context around the work, and produces the actual output: a board-ready report, an internal tool, a workflow, a code commit, a CRM update, a customer call, a planning document. That is why customers don’t just describe Viktor as software. They describe it as an employee. Our view is simple: The next defining AI companies won’t just help people work faster. They’ll take on the work itself. Read the full story from Zhenya Loginov, Cecilia Wang, Philippe Botteri, and Bilal Mobarik here👇 https://lnkd.in/eP-JSb58

Inference is one of AI’s most important bottlenecks. As models move from answering questions to completing complex work, the ability to run them faster, cheaper, and at greater scale will define what the next generation of AI applications can do. Fractile is building next-generation inference hardware designed for the workloads now emerging across AI - from agentic coding to scientific discovery and enterprise automation. Read more from the Accel team on why we believe Fractile can become one of the world’s most important AI infrastructure companies and why we're co-leading the company’s Series B with Factorial Funds and Founders Fund here: https://lnkd.in/eMDAq_AE

Inference is one of AI’s most important bottlenecks. As models move from answering questions to completing complex work, the ability to run them faster, cheaper, and at greater scale will define what the next generation of AI applications can do. Fractile is building next-generation inference hardware designed for the workloads now emerging across AI - from agentic coding to scientific discovery and enterprise automation. Read more from the Accel team on why we believe Fractile can become one of the world’s most important AI infrastructure companies and why we're co-leading the company’s Series B with Factorial Funds and Founders Fund here: https://lnkd.in/eMDAq_AE

One-quarter of the global economy is industrial and more than half of production costs still come from labor. That's because traditional robots can only handle what they've been explicitly programmed to do. RJ Scaringe is building one of the world's leading industrial robotics platforms, combining foundation models, robust hardware, and deployment infrastructure to automate dexterous, reasoning-intensive manufacturing tasks at scale. This is just the beginning for Mind Robotics. https://lnkd.in/gjJQYZ25

We are very pleased to share that Fractile has raised a $220M Series B funding round led by Accel, Founders Fund and Factorial Funds. This fundraising round will supercharge our mission, and see us continue to scale our team across the UK, US and Taiwan as we work to get our chips and systems into customers’ hands. We are hiring across the entire stack, from silicon to systems to software. Thank you to all our backers in this mission, including Conviction, Gigascale Capital, 01 Advisors, Buckley Ventures, 8VC, Felicis, Oxford Science Enterprises, Kindred Capital VC, NATO Innovation Fund (NIF), and Cocoa 🍫. To find out more about our vision for the future of AI, and how what we are building will make it possible, read more here: https://lnkd.in/eaehCFeb

As open models approach frontier capabilities, the same tools that empower builders will empower attackers. The window to get ahead of that is now. Today, depthfirst announced the Open Defense Initiative — dedicating up to $5M in credits to identify exploitable vulnerabilities. If you're building a critical open source project, learn more below.