General Catalyst Launches Percepta to Drive AI Transformation Across Enterprises

Venture capital firm General Catalyst has announced the formation of Percepta, a new company that will deploy researchers, engineers and product managers directly within various enterprises, including healthcare organizations, to assist with business transformation using artificial intelligence. The launch comes one day after General Catalyst CEO Hemant Taneja announced the closing of the firm's $485 million acquisition of Ohio healthcare system Summa Health through its Health Assurance Transformation Company venture.

"Percepta has built differentiated playbooks for how to execute AI transformation of healthcare, manufacturing, financial services and government," the venture capital firm said in a statement. "As Percepta grows over the next few years, we expect the team to become a leading transformation partner for companies and governments around the world." The new company has established strategic partnerships with AWS and Anthropic, which will provide access to technology, scale capabilities and enterprise readiness to support its transformation initiatives.

General Catalyst said Percepta has already begun assisting with clinical workflows and patient engagement for payers and providers in the healthcare sector. The firm reiterated its position that AI relies on three critical components: advancing foundational and intelligence models, developing an underlying data infrastructure, and enabling workforce adoption of AI. Percepta is designed to help synchronize these three elements across enterprise implementations.

Regarding the intelligence layer, Athul Paul Jacob, Percepta's cofounder and chief AI officer, and Costis Daskalakis, the company's cofounder and chief scientist, will lead a research lab to pursue advanced model building and decision-making capability across industries. General Catalyst said the research will include a blend of foundation models, optimization, game theory and reinforcement learning.

"At General Catalyst, we have always lived at the bleeding edge of both technology and company-building. We don't just invest in the future; we build it alongside entrepreneurs. With Percepta, fully owned by General Catalyst, we're bringing that same edge directly into the enterprise, turning our investments, partnerships, and learnings into enterprise-scale transformation," the company said in a statement.

The Percepta launch follows significant activity from General Catalyst in the healthcare sector. Earlier this week, Taneja announced on LinkedIn that the VC firm's business venture, Health Assurance Transformation Company, completed its acquisition of Summa Health. "As the largest employer in Akron, we now carry both responsibility and opportunity: to serve the community for generations to come, and to demonstrate that a safety-net hospital can thrive and serve as a blueprint for healthcare transformation and innovation," Taneja wrote. General Catalyst announced its intentions to purchase the nonprofit healthcare system in January 2024 and signed a definitive agreement in November of that year. Summa operates over 30 locations throughout the Akron and Canton areas, including community-based health centers, hospitals, a multispecialty group practice, multiple foundations, research and medical education programs, and a health plan called SummaCare.

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