Percepto, which builds drones for applications in industrial purposes, raises $45M Series B and integrates its Sparrow drones with Boston Dynamics' Spot
Consumer drones have over the years struggled with an image of being no more than expensive and delicate toys.
Context & Ripple Effects
This round marks the middle beat of Percepto's funding arc: after a $15M Series A led by USVP and Arkin Holdings in 2019 for autonomous drones serving energy, oil, and gas operators, the $45M Series B funds scaling that same industrial focus — and the company would go on to raise a [[a:$67M Series C led by KDT|Series C]] in 2023.
The headline technical move is the pairing of Percepto's Sparrow drone with Boston Dynamics' Spot robot dog, an air-plus-ground autonomy stack for industrial sites. The pattern has since proven durable: Asylon raised a $26M Series B in 2025 building its DroneDog product on the same Spot platform.
First-order effects
- Percepto's energy, oil, and gas customers get a single autonomous inspection system combining aerial patrols via Sparrow with ground-level coverage via Spot — capital that extends the runway opened by the 2019 Series A.
Second-order effects
- Boston Dynamics gains another industrial integrator building on Spot, deepening the robot dog's ecosystem beyond its own sales channel; competitors like Measure, which sells drones-as-a-service, now compete against vertically integrated hardware-software platforms like Percepto.
Third-order effects
- If the Asylon precedent holds, air-ground robot combinations on shared platforms become the standard architecture for site inspection — favoring companies that own both the fleet software and the multi-modal hardware over pure service providers.
The trend: Industrial autonomy is consolidating around multi-robot platforms that pair aerial drones with ground robots on one software stack, with successive funding rounds tracking the shift.