Percepto launches Axion AI platform to unify inspection data analytics

Percepto, an autonomous drone inspection provider, this week launched Axion, a hardware-agnostic physical AI platform that marks the company’s shift to a software-centric strategy. The company said it allows critical infrastructure operators to analyze data from any third-party drone or sensor network to prevent equipment failures before they escalate.

Founded in 2014, Percepto said its initial team created the technology needed to scale. The company said its new management has decades of independent growth experience in robotics, sensors, the Internet of Things (IoT), physical AI and cybersecurity.

Percepto is headquartered in Modi’in, Israel, with U.S. headquarters in Austin, Texas.

New executives steer Percepto toward a software-centric strategy

Julien Bellanger recently took the helm from longtime CEO Dor Abuhasira along with new revenue and marketing leadership. Percepto said the executive changes signal its strategic pivot from a hardware-focused autonomous drone maker to a software-based physical AI provider.

“When I looked at Percepto, I saw a company that had already done the hard part: fully autonomous drones flying real missions every day at some of the most challenging industrial sites in the country,” Bellanger said The robot report. “With AIM [Autonomous Inspection & Monitoring] and Axion, we are taking this operational intelligence beyond our fleet and opening it up to the entire industry.”

The company plans to continue to sell, deploy and support its current product line of drones and drone docks. At the same time, manufacturing will be localized in the United States to support America’s drone dominance initiatives.

Axion extends inspection workflows

Percepto said it designed the Axion platform to add value to inspection workflows in mission-critical operations, including upstream oil and gas, power transmission and distribution, and most downstream processing facilities.

With Axion, Percepto said it plans to work across the industry and help the business grow with AIM’s capabilities. The company is using compliance waivers to control and fly autonomously in one-to-many configurations. Axion will capture all data sources and provide actionable insights with over 160 AI models.

“The infrastructure that powers our economy should benefit from the same advances in artificial intelligence that are transforming the digital world,” Bellanger said. “Our vision is to provide operators with a trusted understanding of what is happening in their infrastructure, with the foresight to protect the people and operations that depend on it.”

“Axion is the first step in this next chapter, opening up our technology to more operators and putting their existing investments in inspections to work towards this goal,” he added. “From day one, a team can take with them the inspection data they already have and see which assets need attention first.”

Available as a software-as-a-service offering, Axion organizes inspection data by asset and applies artificial intelligence that interprets equipment conditions in context. It imports data from supported third-party drone platforms, fixed and mobile sensors, and existing inspection archives, so operators are not tied to a single hardware vendor.

Percept said Axion can identify a fallen cable based on its relationship to surrounding components or evaluate a thermal anomaly against expected asset behavior and environmental conditions. Each finding is supported by inspection history and expert validation, giving teams confidence in what needs attention.

Additionally, Percepto said Axion allows users to query the corpus of inspection data using plain language queries. It said its large language model (LLM) allows users to quickly get the answers they are looking for and exposes the valuable signals contained in inspection data.