IPercept introduces a paradigm shift in the experience related to complex industrial machines. Many large enterprises have already chosen IPercept as a strategic partner in optimizing maintenance and operation of complete metal cutting, forming machines, industrial robots, cranes and further complex machines. The proprietary technology of IPercept can be simply imagined as a machine configured fitness tracker with a range of AI powered software applications. Besides longer lifetime, increased product quality, less downtime, more predictable maintenance and operation, IPercept offers a unique opportunity in empowering people and managing experience throughout the whole organization.
Who founded IPercept? Tell us about the journey of creating the company and the company name.
IPercept Technology was founded in 2019 as a spin-off company from KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. IPercept was founded by Karoly Szipka, now CEO, and Andreas Archenti, now Chief Scientist. The founders were involved in extensive research about maintenance and operational improvement solutions, and IPercept was founded to commercialize their work and make it available to machine builders and operators.
The name of our company, IPercept comes from the words “Integrated Perception” and it reflects our vision, "Integrated Perception in industrial machinery fuels sustainable growth for the benefit of future generations".
Who are you Karoly?
I am a person who gets excited about finding solutions to complex problems using a combination of advanced technologies. And the biggest fun for me, is to learn our way through a problem together with a bunch of curious, driven and gritty talents with different backgrounds. The more complex is the technical problem, the more the inspiration I get. And so far the most beautiful technical complexity I came across is the mechanical degradation of machine tools. When I took the chance to write my PhD at KTH about this topic, I was largely motivated by the impact potential of creating new tools and knowledge on this field. Besides my background in mechatronics engineering, I have studied and worked related to business development before. And delivering a deep tech solution to the conservative market of manufacturing is another intriguing complex challenge. Besides being the CEO of IPercept, I love to give some job to my own personal fitness tracker. After all, we are all optimizing remaining useful life…
Tell us about what you are offering that is unique.
We provide a completely revolutionary solution for how complex machinery can be maintained and operated. We have been selling our solution commercially for two years now and amongst our customers we count 6 of the biggest manufacturers in Sweden.
We can continuously track the health status of each critical component in any complex mechanical system. Typically our solution is deployed on the most advanced CNC milling, drilling, turning machines but we also do robots, presses, gantries, automated logistical systems and much more - for standard machines as well as one-off builds. For those of you versed in maintenance you can think of us as an automated double ballbar, always available to deliver the most accurate analysis.
We provide our customers with actionable insights into remaining useful lifetime (RUL), optimized and prescriptive maintenance activities and much more. We also have a full set of services for operational improvement, utilization tracking, energy monitoring etc. We provide all of this Plug and Play, completely Cyber Secure and highly customizable.
In short, we’re revolutionizing how industrial machines have been maintained and operated since the 70’s.
So IPercept – offers a fitness tracker for machines. When reading about it, sounds great. But what is it that this device does compare to smart sensors and advanced programs with highly skilled staff?
The Fitness Tracker is an analogy for keeping track of health, activity, stress - in this case not for humans but rather for machines. In practical terms it’s an IIoT Device consisting of 15+ sensors, 1000x more sensitive than anything else used on the shop floors and with edge computing capabilities - it’s a little monster of unique design.
Having said this, we’re not in the business of selling hardware. We offer our customers services and these Fitness Trackers are one component to how we enable these services. What you don’t see is the brain behind it all - our cloud services based on Digital Twin Simulations, ML, unique domain understanding in the form of our analysis algorithms and even more importantly, our experts.
From your homepage:
“At IPercept Technology, we work together with your engineers to identify the most critical components and the root causes behind their failures. We then customize our machine learning algorithms to detect and solve these issues.”
This is how you work today. How do you think you will work in five-ten years from now? What does the future hold in this area?
An interesting question that can best be answered with two words; scalability and integration.
Our high degree of automation allows us to expand very rapidly, adding new customers/machines at an incredible rate. We’re doing this while retaining the human in loop - a vital aspect to facilitate and expedite the adoption of these new opportunities. This will allow IPercept to become the de facto standard amongst Swedish manufacturing companies within just a few years and then we take on the world.
But the true mass market application for us comes by integrating our technology with the machine manufacturers themselves as a SaaS. We’ve commenced this already through a number of exciting partnerships with such OEMs. We boldly predict that in five years, most new industrial machines will come with IPercept already inside.
I read that you are working together with one of our members, Toyota Material Handling. Can you elaborate and give us any perspective on your work together?
You’re absolutely right, we already work with a large number of your members and by the end of this year it looks like we will be able to count most of the 30-largest Swedish industrial manufacturing companies as our customers. For these customers we provide exactly that which your network focuses on, Smart Maintenance solutions configured to the specifics of their machines. Our typical customer case creates high business value by applying our predictive maintenance and operational improvement services to their critical machines.
Thank you so much Karoly! We are looking forward to hear from you in the digital Start-Up, Scale Up conference on February 23:rd.
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