Percepto Opens Its Inspection AI to Other Companies' Drones Under a New CEO

For most of its existence, Percepto sold a closed package. You bought its Ranger drones and Harbor docking stations, and the inspection software came with them. On Oct. 27 the Austin-based company announced Axion, a subscription platform that runs Percepto's analytics on data from supported third-party drones, fixed and mobile sensors, and customers' existing archives. A customer no longer has to buy Percepto aircraft to use Percepto's models.

The launch came with a leadership change. The company now names Julien Bellanger as CEO. Percepto calls Axion a "Physical AI" platform, which is a marketing label, but the business shift underneath it is real. A hardware company is putting its software and its data out front.

What Axion Actually Is

According to Percepto, Axion runs more than 160 AI models. They were trained on more than 100,000 hours of autonomous inspection data that the company says it collected over more than a decade. Percepto was founded in 2014. The product is sold as software-as-a-service. Users can query results in plain language instead of building dashboards or filters.

The more interesting claim is about context. As DroneDJ described it, Axion compares what it finds against asset information, inspection history and how the equipment is expected to behave. A hot spot in a thermal image is a good example. Whether it matters depends on the conditions the equipment was operating under at the time. A detector that flags every warm pixel produces noise. A system that knows how an asset normally runs can tell normal heat from an early failure. That kind of filtering is what separates inspection software that saves labor from software that just moves the review work somewhere else.

DroneXL reported that the supported data types include RGB imagery, radiometric thermal, gas-imaging video and orthomosaic maps. Percepto chief marketing officer Amir Khoshniyati told Commercial UAV News that the sensor mix also includes lidar and optical gas imaging (OGI). He said the underlying data spans upstream oil and gas, electric transmission and distribution, downstream processing, and renewables.

What Percepto Has Not Said

The announcement leaves out several things a buyer would want to know.

Which drones are supported? Percepto has not published the list. The press release says "supported" third-party drones, and DroneXL notes that the supported-drone list is unpublished. There is precedent. DroneXL points out that Percepto's earlier AIM software accepted DJI footage as of November 2021. Whether Axion supports DJI aircraft, other manufacturers, or only certain sensor payloads is not public. For US utilities and energy operators that are reviewing their fleets because of restrictions on Chinese-made drones, that answer will shape who can actually use the product.

What does it cost? No pricing has been published, according to DroneXL.

Who is the anchor customer? Percepto says it has a multi-year contract with a leading US energy company for transmission line inspection. It did not name the company or disclose the contract's value.

The Leadership Shuffle

The software pivot comes with a new management team. The press release lists Bellanger as CEO, Kurt Nantkes as chief revenue officer and Khoshniyati as CMO.

The change seems to have happened quickly. DroneXL found that Percepto's June 22 product launch quoted co-founder Dor Abuhasira as CEO. The Oct. 27 announcement names Bellanger and does not mention Abuhasira. DroneXL also reported that neither Abuhasira nor co-founder Sagi Blonder appears on the company's 12-person leadership page. According to DroneXL, neither the release nor Bellanger's launch post says what roles the founders hold now.

Bellanger's background helps explain the strategy. DroneXL reports that he was CEO of Prevoty, an application security company, when Imperva acquired it for $140 million in 2018. That is an enterprise software exit, not a drone or aerospace one. Hiring a software executive to run a company that has just declared itself software-first fits the pattern.

The Hardware Is Not Going Away, Officially

Percepto is not leaving hardware. The company says Ranger drones and Harbor stations remain in the lineup, and Khoshniyati told Commercial UAV News that AIM continues alongside them and could be white-labeled for other drone makers. He described the software-first move as a natural step given the volume of data Percepto has built up.

The company is also consolidating engineering, manufacturing and assembly in the United States. Khoshniyati told Commercial UAV News he expects that to finish in the "near-term" and said assembly already takes place domestically. Percepto did not give details on facilities or headcount.

Percepto also keeps its regulatory advantage. It holds a nationwide FAA waiver for beyond-visual-line-of-sight (BVLOS) operations. DroneXL notes that the flights run under the waiver the FAA granted in 2023, alongside a $67 million funding round.

Why It Matters

The drone-in-a-box market has long been built on a simple idea: sell the dock, the aircraft and the software as one integrated system, and keep the customer inside it. Axion is a bet that the most valuable part of that system is the analytics layer and the training data behind it, not the hardware.

That bet reflects how industrial operators actually work. Large utilities and energy companies rarely run a single fleet. They collect imagery from contracted crews, in-house pilots, fixed cameras, crewed helicopter patrols and old archives. A platform that can process all of it is easier to sell than one that requires replacing aircraft that are already paid for. DroneDJ makes a similar point, noting that companies can begin with data they already have rather than overhaul their operations.

The risk is competition. By opening its analytics to other vendors' drones, Percepto is now up against a crowded field of inspection-software and computer-vision companies, and its claim to 100,000-plus hours of domain-specific training data will be the main differentiator. Whether Axion's context-aware analysis cuts false alarms in practice is something only customer deployments will show. The unnamed transmission-line contract is the first test.

Until Percepto publishes which drones Axion supports and what it costs, operators cannot judge how "hardware-agnostic" the platform really is. Those are the details to watch as the new leadership team starts selling it.