IPercept, a Stockholm company that monitors the mechanical condition of CNC machine tools, raised $16.5m in a Series A round, it announced on 29 September 2026.
Isogon Ventures and 2150, a London-headquartered venture firm, co-led the round. Existing investors Luminar Ventures, RunwayFBU, J12 Ventures and AI.Fund also took part. The company did not disclose a valuation or how much it had raised before this round.
“CNC machine tools make every other machine on Earth, and until now almost nobody could see inside them on component-level while they run. That took a new measurement principle, five years of research, and four years of real-world data. We are ready to bring it to every factory that needs it.”Karoly Szipka, Founder and CEO, IPercept
What IPercept does
CNC machines are the computer-controlled tools that cut and shape metal parts for industries such as aerospace, cars, electronics, medical devices and energy. IPercept says the machines are poorly observed: the controller tells the machine how to move but does not measure its mechanical condition, and standard vibration sensors were designed for simpler equipment such as pumps and motors.
The company's answer is a single patented device that is mounted on the moving part of a CNC machine of any make or age. It turns micrometre-scale motion into data on the condition of individual components, such as spindles, ballscrews, guides and bearings, and shows how quickly they are wearing. The device does not connect to the machine controller or to the customer's IT network, which Pulse 2.0 noted matters for manufacturers in security-sensitive settings. IPercept also offers an AI assistant that explains machine wear, faults and degradation, according to Tech.eu.
Customers include Airbus, Bosch, Scania, Hitachi Energy and Volvo, and IPercept works with industrial service partners including Konecranes and Quant, according to Pulse 2.0.
Who invested
Paco Riberas, general partner at Isogon Ventures, said in the announcement that unplanned CNC downtime was where industrial operations break down and called IPercept the most seamless and accurate answer the field had produced.
Rahul Parekh, a partner at 2150, said the firm backed IPercept because it brings intelligence directly to industrial equipment, and that 2150 would support the team as it expands into the US.
The four existing investors, Luminar Ventures, RunwayFBU, J12 Ventures and AI.Fund, all returned for the round.
What the money is for
IPercept said it would use the funding in three areas. It plans to scale its operations in the US and make its first dedicated local hires in sales and deployment. It will add a series of add-on intelligence applications to its data platform. And it will expand its partnerships with industrial service providers while growing its engineering and data science teams.
Tech.eu described the move as a US launch, alongside further work on the technology.
From KTH research to factories
IPercept was founded in 2019 as a spinout from KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, according to Pulse 2.0. Tech.eu reported that it began commercialising its product in 2022.
Founder and chief executive Karoly Szipka holds a PhD in CNC machine diagnostics from KTH, and co-founder Andreas Archenti is a chair professor in industrial dependability at the university. The company said it had approached CNC monitoring as a domain-specific engineering problem rather than a data science one, measuring the physical behaviour of a machine directly instead of relying on large sets of historical data.
Szipka said the technology had taken a new measurement principle, five years of research and four years of real-world data to develop. The company did not report its headcount.
Company website: ipercept.io