May 14, 2026

R&Dy or not

Hi there,

Here is this week’s Hot or Not.

Hot: AI in drug discovery 

Google’s drug discovery spinout Isomorphic Labs just raised a $2.1B Series B round, with participation from Thrive Capital and Google Ventures.

The capital is earmarked for its drug design engine and global expansion, with existing pharma partnerships with J&J, Eli Lilly, and Novartis already in place.

AI could cut years off the discovery process and compress clinical trial times by up to 30%, accelerating delivery of new treatments and enabling more personalized medicine.

See all 225 AI-driven drug R&D companies in our market map.

Not: Unprotected autonomous agents

As autonomous agents proliferate across enterprise workflows, security is becoming a first-order problem.

A new category of startups is building the trust layer that agentic AI currently lacks.

Four companies on CB Insights' AI 100 list illustrate the emerging stack:

• Keycard: dynamic token credentialing scoped to individual agent tasks
• Geordie AI: real-time risk mitigation for autonomous systems
• Virtue AI: pre-deployment model behavior testing across production environments
• Straiker: adversarial testing combined with runtime protection

See who's building the observability & evaluation layer in our list of the 100 most promising AI companies of 2026.

Hot: The AI workforce

Professional services leaders are betting on AI startups to reinvent how consulting gets done.

Accenture and KPMG lead enterprise AI investment activity among professional services firms, backing startups across skills intelligence, workforce analytics, and enterprise agents.

Notably, consulting firms are using equity to plug capability gaps in their own delivery platforms. For example:

• Accenture invested in both Workera and Workhelix to power its LearnVantage skilling service
• KPMG backed Wokelo for AI investment research and Ema for enterprise agents
• Bain backed Outset.ai for AI-driven market research

Explore the full trend in our Future of Professional Services report.

Not: Single-robot systems

Most enterprise robot deployments today are still single-unit, but the next frontier of robotics is coordinating multiple units toward a shared objective.

Foundation models and purpose-built hardware have advanced to the point where autonomous systems can handle unstructured environments at commercial scale, spanning autonomous systems from general-purpose robots to industrial humanoids.

Startups like FieldAI offer risk-aware frameworks that enable multiple agents or robots to operate cohesively.

See who else is winning the multi-robot coordination race in our Future of Robotics briefing.

The +1

Source: u/ichwarsni01 via Reddit.

Whale scale. A sea of errors.

I love you.

Anand

@asanwal 

Co-Founder & Exec Chair

P.S. Want to learn about the future of SaaS? Register for the briefing here.

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