Percepto opens its drone-inspection AI to rival hardware with Axion, 160+ models

Percepto, which has sold autonomous drones and docking stations to energy and industrial sites since 2014, is now selling its inspection AI without the drones. The Austin company launched Axion on Oct 27, a software-as-a-service platform that applies more than 160 specialized AI models to inspection data from third-party drone platforms, fixed and mobile sensors and operators' existing archives, the company said in a press release.

Percepto said the models were trained on more than 100,000 hours of real-world autonomous inspection data gathered over more than a decade. Axion organizes findings by asset and judges condition in context; the release gives two examples, recognizing a downed wire by its relation to surrounding components and weighing a thermal anomaly against expected asset behavior and weather. Operators can also query their assets and findings in plain language. Customers who want more frequent coverage can add Percepto's Ranger drones and Harbor stations and its managed remote operations, which run under a nationwide FAA beyond-visual-line-of-sight waiver.

A new team for a software business

The launch comes with new leadership: chief executive Julien Bellanger, chief revenue officer Kurt Nantkes and chief marketing officer Amir Khoshniyati. Percepto also said a leading U.S. energy company, which it did not name, awarded it a multi-year contract for aerial data collection and AI analytics across its transmission network, extending an existing relationship, and that it is moving engineering, manufacturing and assembly to the United States. The release gives no pricing, customer count or revenue.

Why it matters

Drone hardware is crowded and, in the US, shaped by rules on where drones and parts are made; a decade of labeled inspection data is harder to copy. By MEKAWIRE's arithmetic, 100,000 hours over the roughly 12 years since 2014 is an average of about 8,300 hours of autonomous inspection a year (100,000 / 12). Opening the models to other vendors' fleets puts Percepto in competition with the analytics layers of drone makers such as Skydio and with ground inspection robots such as ANYbotics' ANYmal, which also sell data to the same utilities. What to watch: whether Percepto names the energy customer and publishes Axion pricing. The Percepto company page follows the story.