Autonomous data collection startup Thread, which aims to transform asset inspection in the energy and utilities industries, said today it has closed on a $15 million early-stage funding round.

Today’s Series A investment was led by Badlands Capital and saw participation from Minnkota Power Cooperative, Generational Partners, Rosecliff Ventures, Excell Partners, Homegrown Capital and Kevin O’Leary’s Wonder Fund North Dakota.

Thread has created an intelligent data collection platform that energy and utility providers can combine with advanced robotics such as drones to automate the asset inspection process. As the startup explains, asset inspection has traditionally always been a very time-consuming and sometimes even dangerous process, with workers required to check each piece of equipment manually. Even with the introduction of drones, asset inspection remains complex, as these new methods still require human operators to oversee them.

To overcome these inefficiencies, Thread has created the UNITI software platform that automates data capture of utility assets through robotic inspections of wind, oil and gas infrastructure. UNITI acts as a link between data capture and data analytics. It helps to contextualize data at the edge, where it’s created by drones, sensors and other machines, providing a fully automated pipeline through to machine vision workflows that continuously inspect the state of edge assets.

UNITI automates drone operation with rules-based flight, where the drone is programmed to know the attributes of each asset it’s required to inspect. The data it collects is contextualized at the point of capture, then fed into a cloud-based data pipeline where it can be consumed by machine vision algorithms to generate insights

Thread founder and Chief Executive Josh Riedy said today’s funding will help it to achieve its goal of becoming the first practical asset performance management platform for the energy and utilities industries. He said energy and utility firms are challenged by disconnected workflow integrations between traditional software and robotics assets, as well as a depleted operations and maintenance workforce.

“This Series A funding allows us to better service our customer’s needs by bridging the gap between legacy one-off inspections and real-time asset performance data, bringing the industry into the digital age,” Riedy explained. “We are enabling our customers to cut inspection workstreams from days into hours, using UNITI as a single point for collaborative decision-making and O&M spend prioritization.”

Thread said its software has already been deployed to manage the robotics fleets of companies including Xcel Energy Inc. and Mistras Group Inc.

Asher Kraut of Generational Partners said the promise of low-cost, on-demand asset inspections by drones has failed to materialize due to a lack of integration and automation. “Thread has not only fully automated the inspection process, but they’ve also built a turnkey platform that empowers its customers to make operations and maintenance decisions based on real-time data across their entire fleet of assets,” Kraut said. “It’s a prime example of an emerging business that is leveraging well-understood technologies once considered ‘deep tech’ to solve today’s most crucial customer challenges.”

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