Percepto

A drone that lives in a box

Percepto was founded in 2014, according to the company's website. The founders are Dor Abuhasira, the CEO, Ariel Avitan, Sagi Blonder and Raviv Raz. The product is built as a "drone in a box": a drone permanently stationed at an industrial site inside a docking station, which takes off on preprogrammed missions and returns to recharge without an operator on site. According to a report on a Chevron pilot, the drones fly fixed routes, and artificial intelligence spots anomalies in the footage and sends alerts. On top of the drones runs a platform called AIM, which covers the whole path from capturing the footage to analyzing it. The company presents AIM as part of TIME magazine's list of the best inventions of 2021. A similar system was built by the Israeli company Airobotics: a drone that takes off and lands autonomously from a base the size of a dumpster, which holds spare batteries and modules.

Regulation as the bottleneck

According to Abuhasira, in an interview with TechCrunch, the drone industry's biggest obstacle was regulation, not technology. In June 2023, the company announced that it had received a nationwide waiver from the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to fly beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS). According to TechCrunch, this was the first time an industrial drone company had received such a waiver. It means that at critical infrastructure sites in the United States there is no longer a need for a separate approval for each site, nor for additional staff or radar on the ground. This shortens installation time and lowers costs.

Funding, layoffs and company structure

In June 2023, the company announced a $67 million Series C round. According to CTech, about $50 million of the amount was equity and the rest was debt from Kreos Capital. The round was led by Koch Disruptive Technologies, with participation from Zimmer Partners and existing investors, and total investment in the company passed $120 million. The round came a month after a second wave of layoffs: about 30 employees, 18 percent of the staff, after 21 employees were laid off in August 2022. According to CTech, the company employed 130 people at the time, about 100 of them at what the article called its headquarters in Modi'in. That same week, TechCrunch described the company as headquartered in Austin, Texas, but founded in Israel and with its roots there. In other words, the sources differ on where the headquarters is, but most of the staff were then in Israel.

Customers and uses

The customers mentioned in the 2023 announcements are Siemens Energy, Delek US, companies in the Koch group and ICL's Dead Sea Works. The main use is routine visual inspection of facilities: gas leaks, overheating and wear of infrastructure. According to the company, a customer in the oil and gas industry used a drone equipped with a gas detection camera to find a methane leak within hours. In March 2025, it was reported that a pilot with Chevron near Midland, Texas, had reached the six-month mark. Not every direction succeeded: a 2020 partnership with Boston Dynamics did not expand the way the drone business did, as the CEO told TechCrunch, and the company has since presented its software as able to work with different robotic platforms.

Status as of September 2026

In the sources checked, there was no report of an acquisition, an IPO or new funding after 2023. The company's website shows a management team in the United States and Israel. It is therefore classified here as a private, active company, with the date of the check. Two further clarifications: TechCrunch noted that there is another Israeli company named Percepto that works in reputation management and is not related to this company. And some of the figures here, such as the savings for customers and the growth rate the CEO mentioned, are figures the company provided itself.