Voliro provides a drone platform with a number of readily built-in instruments constructed for various duties, together with its Pulsed Eddy Present (PEC) Sensor pictured above. | Supply: Voliro
Voliro, a Swiss aerial robotics developer, introduced final week an $11 million extension of its Sequence A spherical, bringing the overall to $23 million. The corporate introduced the primary a part of the spherical in October.
Voliro stated the extra capital will assist it speed up the event and international deployment of its autonomous aerial inspection robots. It designed these robots to modernize infrastructure upkeep, improve industrial security, and tackle rising workforce shortages.
“Voliro’s expertise straight addresses a trifecta of worldwide wants: enhancing industrial resilience and security, enabling the local weather adaptation and power transition by higher sustaining property like wind farms, and assuaging extreme workforce shortages within the inspection subject. Our expertise represents a mandatory device to guard the constructed setting that all of us depend on,” stated Florian Gutzwiller, Voliro’s CEO.
The firm constructed its Voliro T platform on a patented tiltable-rotor design and geared up it with interchangeable sensor payloads. Voliro stated its expertise provides a scalable, data-driven system for safer, extra sustainable operations.
Voliro’s Sequence A extension noticed new participation from indefinite and the addition of a debt facility from UBS. The unique spherical was led by Cherry Ventures.
Inside Voliro’s expertise
Voliro designed its aerial robots to examine hard-to-reach infrastructure safely and effectively. This contains something from flare stacks and storage tanks to wind turbine blades and transmission towers, the corporate stated. The Voliro T platform allows asset house owners throughout the power, chemical substances, and renewables sectors to detect points early and do proactive upkeep.
Within the fast-growing wind business, the place uptime is essential, Voliro claimed it allows 5 occasions quicker wind turbine lightning safety system (LPS) inspections with instantaneous insights. It additionally stated it’s slicing downtime and lowering inspection prices by as much as 50%, all with out guide entry.
Since its founding, Voliro has established a world footprint with over 40 clients in 17 nations, together with Chevron, Holcim, and Acuren. Performing over 100 contact inspections month-to-month, Voliro claimed it has confirmed success throughout complicated industrial environments.
“Giant-scale Industrial inspections are a large alternative for robotics and automation disruption. Each getting old and new property, whether or not industrial, power, or infrastructure associated, will profit from extra frequent, automated, dependable, and data-driven inspections,” Gregory Dewerpe, Founder and Managing Companion at noa.
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Voliro targets getting old infrastructures world wide
As industrial property age, failures in vital, hard-to-access buildings like flare stacks, storage tanks, chimneys, and towers have gotten extra frequent, dangerous, and dear, Voliro stated. Investigations into main accidents over the previous decade repeatedly cite corrosion, wall thinning, or undetected fatigue as root causes. These are points which can be ceaselessly ignored as a result of conventional inspections are pricey, rare, and largely reactive.
Voliro asserts these figures aren’t anomalies. Research present that as much as 30% of main industrial accidents in Europe contain getting old infrastructure and integrity points. Globally, corrosion-related failures are estimated to value the economic system $2.5 trillion yearly, the corporate stated.
Conventional inspection strategies depend on scaffolding, rope entry, and shutdowns—approaches that introduce vital danger, delay vital diagnostics, and restrict how typically inspections will be carried out.
On the identical time, within the U.S., practically two-thirds of licensed NDT (non-destructive testing) professionals are over 40, reflecting a broader pattern seen throughout OECD nations, the place a wave of retirements is accelerating attributable to getting old populations. As skilled inspectors exit the workforce, industries face an pressing want for smarter expertise and instruments that cut back reliance on guide entry.
