The inspection round is a ritual of industrial life. Someone, somewhere, has to walk the perimeter of a solar farm, climb a flare stack, or scan a tank for corrosion. Percepto’s founding bet, back in 2014, was that this ritual could be handed over to a robot. Not just a drone, but a system: a weatherproof box that houses, charges, and deploys an autonomous drone on a schedule, feeding visual data into an AI platform that flags anomalies before a human ever needs to look.
After a decade of development, the company’s momentum is increasingly defined by regulatory approvals. In 2023, Percepto became the first industrial drone company to receive a nationwide Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) waiver from the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration [TechCrunch, June 2023]. This was a blanket approval for its systems to operate across the country without a human visual observer.
The hardware-software wedge
Percepto’s product, the Autonomous Inspection and Monitoring (AIM) platform, is a hardware-plus-software wedge. The hardware is the ‘drone-in-a-box’, ruggedized stations like the Percepto Air that can be installed on-site. The software is the AIM brain, which manages flight schedules, processes imagery with computer vision, and generates reports. The company has also integrated with Boston Dynamics' Spot robot [TechCrunch, November 2020].
Traction and the Koch connection
In 2022, Forbes reported on what it called “the world’s largest autonomous commercial drone deployment” at Florida Power & Light (FPL) [Forbes, April 2022]. The company also counts Siemens Energy and refiner Delek US among its Fortune 500 customers [CTech, 2023]. Koch Disruptive Technologies (KDT) led Percepto’s $45 million Series B in late 2020 and returned to lead a $67 million round in mid-2023 [Percepto, November 2020] [TechCrunch, June 2023].
| Round | Amount | Lead Investor | Date |
|---|---|---|---|
| Series B | $45M | Koch Disruptive Technologies | November 2020 |
| Series C | $67M | Koch Disruptive Technologies | June 2023 |
Navigating turbulence and scale
CTech reported that Percepto conducted a second round of layoffs about a month before announcing its $67 million Series C in 2023 [CTech, 2023]. The company’s headcount estimates vary, from around 130 in 2023 to 173 in 2024 [CTech, 2023] [GetLatka]. Revenue figures are similarly broad, with one source estimating $26 million for 2024 [GetLatka].
The unit economics of not sending a person
For a climate and energy beat, the story is about the carbon and cost of maintaining infrastructure. Sending a technician in a truck to a remote site has a measurable emissions footprint. A Percepto system, once installed, performs inspections autonomously, zeroing out the recurring travel and labor. The payback period hinges on the system’s cost versus the avoided operational expenses, but the environmental math is straightforward: fewer truck miles equals less Scope 1 emissions for the operator.