IPercept, a Stockholm-based startup that mounts sensors on industrial machinery to predict mechanical failures, announced on September 29, 2026 it closed a $16.5 million Series A funding round. Isogon Ventures and 2150 co-led the investment, with participation from Luminar Ventures, RunwayFBU, J12 Ventures and AI.Fund.
The company, which spun out of KTH Royal Institute of Technology in 2019, will use the capital to establish its first U.S. presence with dedicated hires stateside. Additional funds will extend its AI software capabilities and deepen relationships with service providers who integrate IPercept into maintenance contracts, the startup said. The company declined to disclose its valuation.
At the heart of IPercept's pitch is a frustration familiar to anyone who has run a factory floor: CNC machine tools break down without warning, idling production lines that cost manufacturers thousands of dollars per hour. The startup's hardware attaches a single device to the moving components of a CNC machine—the table or spindle—where it measures motion at micrometer precision. Edge processing happens directly on the device, which then transmits diagnostics to IPercept's cloud platform without tapping into machine controllers or existing factory IT networks.
That controller-agnostic approach matters in industrial settings where equipment fleets often span multiple brands, vintages and software generations. Installation on large machines takes roughly 45 minutes, and the system begins surfacing component-level faults within a week of deployment, according to the company. IPercept claims in its marketing that it can cut unplanned downtime by 80 percent.
"CNC machine tools make every other machine on Earth, and until now almost nobody could see inside them while they run," said Karoly Szipka, IPercept's co-founder and CEO, who holds a PhD in CNC machine diagnostics from KTH and spent over a decade researching the field there.
Media reports have named Airbus, Bosch, Hitachi Energy, Scania and Volvo as enterprise customers, though the startup has not independently verified these relationships and those companies have not publicly confirmed them in available filings. The startup has also announced partnerships that suggest growing traction. A Gulf region deal with Quant carries what IPercept described as up to €10 million in revenue potential, while a collaboration with the University of Sheffield's Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre points to validation in academic research circles.
IPercept prices its offering per machine and per service module. Customers can stack capabilities over time—machine health monitoring, utilization tracking, process-load analysis, spindle testing. Recently, the company introduced what it calls CNC Copilot, an AI assistant embedded in its portal that fuses live machine data, alarm logs and verified manuals to guide operators and maintenance teams through troubleshooting steps.
The startup sells directly and through service partners including Konecranes, DynaMate and Machine Tool Technologies, which weave IPercept's diagnostics into maintenance packages for aerospace, automotive, defense and medical-device manufacturers.
"Industry is meant to run like a well-oiled machine, and unplanned CNC downtime is where that ideal breaks," said Paco Riberas, general partner at Isogon Ventures, a firm focused on AI applications in the physical economy.
Rahul Parekh, partner at 2150—a climate-focused venture firm that recently raised a €210 million fund—sees IPercept as part of a broader shift. "The next wave of AI will change how the physical world operates," Parekh said. "IPercept is bringing intelligence directly to industrial equipment."
The company operates in a competitive field. MachineMetrics monitors CNC machines by reading their controllers directly. Augury deploys vibration and ultrasound sensors across rotating equipment. Samotics analyzes electrical signatures from industrial assets. IPercept differentiates itself through its controller-independent architecture, allowing it to work across heterogeneous fleets without requiring integration into proprietary systems.
IPercept previously raised €5 million in seed funding in May 2025, led by Luminar Ventures with participation from RunwayFBU, Backstage Invest, AI.Fund and J12. The company's team size is reported as over twenty employees, though public sources list figures ranging from 31 on LinkedIn to as many as 50, a count that will grow as the company plants roots in the United States. Whether American manufacturers will embrace diagnostics retrofitted onto legacy equipment—or wait for the next generation of smart machines with sensors baked in—remains the open question for IPercept's expansion.
