- The company IPercept, based in Stockholm, has raised a Series A funding round of $16.5 million, with Isogon Ventures and 2150 as co-leads.
- Percept now has more than 20 employees and works with over 30 leading customers, including Airbus, Bosch, Hitachi Energy, Scania and Volvo.
- CNC machines are of great importance in the manufacturing process, but their average efficiency has remained at 50-60% for many decades.
Humanoid robots and warehouse automation have attracted a great deal of investment this year, whereas CNC machine tools, used in the production of a wide variety of products, have not received similar attention. These machines have generally worked without any monitoring since the 1940s.
The Stockholm-based startup IPercept has raised $16.5 million with a view to addressing this gap by providing diagnostics that do not require access to the machine controllers. Isogon Ventures and 2150 jointly led the Series A financing, with continued support from Luminar Ventures, RunwayFBU, J12 Ventures, and AI.Fund.
“We have just completed an investment round which is large given the standards for Swedish industrial start-ups, and we are happy to be able to speed up our growth,” says Karoly Szipka, co-founder and CEO of IPercept, to Tech Funding News, stating that CNC machines account for almost 3% of global GDP and that products made using them make up another 30 to 40%.
A domain problem rather than a data problem
Szipka obtained his PhD in CNC machine diagnostics from the KTH Royal Institute of Technology and has since worked in the field for over ten years. He relocated from Hungary to Sweden, inspired by the nation’s industrial achievements.
“I am proud that IPercept could turn out to be one of the next companies to build on that miracle,” he says to TFN.
The company was established to meet industry demand, rather than as a result of a sudden breakthrough. According to Szipka, the major Swedish manufacturers first attempted to address CNC monitoring by employing data scientists.
“We realised it wasn’t a data science or AI issue at the beginning but a domain-specific problem first,” he says to TFN. This realisation led them to the Royal Institute of Technology, where Szipka and his co-founder, Andreas Archenti, a chair professor at KTH in the field of industrial dependability, set up IPercept in 2019 and launched the technology to market in 2022.
An MRI for a $1 trillion machine park
The device from the startup can be fitted to the moving section of any CNC machine, regardless of brand, model, or age. It can measure motion at the micrometre level without needing to connect to the machine’s controller or the customer’s IT network.
“It’s similar to performing a full-body MRI scan on these large and complicated machines. We have a complete understanding of each and every component, and this enables us to prevent the machines from failing,” says Szipka.
The solution makes no use of historical data, is compatible with around 300 CNC machine manufacturers, and takes only a few hours to install on each machine.
The predictive maintenance market could grow to $97.37 billion by 2034. Although high-profile robotics are mainly responsible for this growth, CNC machines account for a significant share of the market. A total of $1 trillion worth of these machines are in use around the world.
Partners, not competitors
Talking about competitors, Szipka says, “We regard all other companies as possible partners within the industrial ecosystem. That is the Swedish approach: you look at partnership rather than at competition.”
Yet companies such as Augury, Samotics, and MachineMetrics are addressing similar problems in a different technical way. Augury uses vibration and ultrasound sensors attached to general rotating equipment, Samotics monitors electrical signatures, and MachineMetrics keeps an eye on CNC machines by connecting to their controllers.
Airbus, Bosch, Hitachi Energy, Scania and Volvo are among the company’s customers, together with various industrial service companies such as Konecranes, Quant, DynaMate and MTT, which resell IPercept’s monitoring as part of their maintenance agreements.
Szipka states that IPercept now has more than thirty well-known enterprise customers and that the company has increased by more than three times in the past six to eight months. The team has just reached a strength of over twenty people, and the new funding will allow the company to make its first dedicated appointments in the United States.
Paco Riberas, a general partner with Isogon Ventures, stated, “Industry is meant to run like a well-oiled machine, and unplanned CNC downtime is where that ideal breaks. IPercept is the most seamless, accurate answer the space has produced – and exactly what critical industries need.”
Rahul Parekh, partner at 2150, added. “The next wave of AI will change how the physical world operates. IPercept is bringing intelligence directly to industrial equipment, helping manufacturers understand their equipment in real time, improve productivity and extend the life of critical assets.”
IPercept had previously completed a €5 million seed round in May 2025, again led by Luminar Ventures. Szipka states that the new funding will aid in strengthening partnerships with industrial service companies and will help with expansion into the US market.
He concludes, “Our aim is for our technology to enable Western manufacturers to speed up and get back to the top of the competitive landscape.”
