Arkion (formerly Skyqraft)

We’re thrilled to welcome Omar Berrada as our new Commercial Director for North America. Omar brings extensive leadership and sales experience from Dell and Microsoft, and he’ll be spearheading our sales efforts in the region. We look forward to the impact he’ll make at Arkion.

We’re excited to announce that Arkion has secured €4M in funding! This strategic investment, led by Subvenio Invest with participation from Neptunia Invest and Antler, will support our growth and innovation in AI-powered asset analytics for power grids. With this funding, we aim to enhance our product quality and service range, expand our market presence, and increase our technical scalability. Our recent milestones, including tripling our revenue and achieving over 80% AI coverage of faults in distribution grids, highlight our potential to transform the infrastructure inspection industry. We’re committed to building resilient, sustainable grid infrastructure for a net-zero future. Thank you to our investors for their support and belief in our vision. Together, we’re transforming the way we care for our power grids. #AI #PowerGrids #Sustainability #Innovation #FundingNews #Arkion

In 2023, the planet experienced the hottest year since record keeping began. The European Climate Change Service, Copernicus, reported that May 2024 marked 12 consecutive months of record-breaking temperatures globally. While the grid largely held up after the hot summer of 2023, the increased global temperatures and a growing number of extreme weather events mean that stability is far from guaranteed.  Last month, a heatwave in the northeastern US caused a power grid to declare an emergency. A surge in air conditioning use can lead to rolling blackouts and outages, but air conditioning saves lives—in many places, it’s a necessity, not a luxury.  Power grids are under pressure to deliver consistent, affordable electricity, under conditions the grids weren’t built for, and often with aging, insufficient assets. The first step to improving resilience is to understand how to assess, manage, and address risks. This means both the short-term risks caused by downed trees and broken components, and being able to assess wear and corrosion to prioritize upgrades and investments. Arkion helps grid owners get reliable data on asset conditions to help manage risk, mitigate issues, and create a more resilient grid for years to come. #energytransition #energy #climatechange

A resilient grid needs reliable, accurate data on the real conditions of its assets. In the past, utilities have gathered this information by sending people out, either on the ground or in helicopters, but there’s a growing move toward using drones that can capture detailed images and other sensor data. Asset analytics is how you make the most of that data to maximize the grid you already have, even as you’re building the grid of the future.  During routine inspections, it can be easy to fixate on critical defects. After all, they can put the public at risk or lead to outages, and they usually require planned downtime, so they’re the most urgent things to address. Arkion helps you make even those time-sensitive decisions more efficiently and cost-effectively. But Arkion does much more. Utilities get a huge range of information about asset conditions, all ranked by severity. This information can be used to plan maintenance, repairs, and upgrades, not just over months, but over years. This condition data isn’t based on general models, but on each specific grid, so you can shift toward the preventive maintenance that’s needed to extend asset lifetimes. Upgrades are capital intensive, and they take years, even decades. Adding a few years to a 40-year old asset is essential, especially at a time of increasing demand. This means that using asset analytics, you can do more than manage risk in the short and medium term, you can also chart the grid improvements, giving you something that hasn’t been easy to generate: what resilience can look like in data. #powergrids #energy #energytransition

Renewable energy costs are decreasing, but grid upgrades are slow and expensive. Electricity demand is expected to double by 2045, driven by data centers, climate change, and EV adoption. To meet the UN's 2050 net-zero target, we need diverse, innovative energy solutions and resilient digital infrastructure. Arkion is part of a global effort to enhance power grids and ensure sustainable energy for the future. Read more about the potential of asset analytics for power grids in the blog post below. #energyshift #powergrid #climategoals

Join Arkion at the Future of Utilities Summit in London on June 19-20. The Future of Utilities Summit brings together leading industry professionals to shape the future of the utilities sector. Achieving this vision requires accurate data to assess the condition of all power grid assets. At Arkion, we contribute to the energy transition and the future of utilities by providing this crucial data. See you next week! https://lnkd.in/e8-PZgxg

Join us next week at the Energy Drone & Robotics Coalition Summit in Houston, TX. Discover how drone data enables asset analytics to revolutionize asset management for power grids. Our AI-powered analytics tool transforms high-quality drone data into actionable insights, enabling condition-based investments and maintenance. Contact Drazen Jurman or Humberto Salgado for a live demo of our cutting-edge solutions.

Today, the company you’ve known as Skyqraft is re-launching as Arkion. When we started in 2019, we were a drone and AI startup. We helped power grids by flying the overhead lines to collect images, and doing large-scale analysis of every component to issues and defects. Since then, we’ve shifted our focus. We stopped providing drones ourselves, so we could put our energy into the path we’re on now. We still deliver detailed reports from our AI-powered analysis. But we’ve evolved into a leading provider of asset analytics for some of the world’s most innovative utilities. The name Skyqraft fit who we were when we started, but it doesn’t align with the direction we’re headed, or our vision for the electrified future. As Arkion, we are the same team, and we’re renewing our commitment to helping power grids meet the growing demand for electricity. Read more about where we’ve come from and where we’re going. The link is in the comments. #EnergyShift #AI #Utilities

This week, we're heading to Utility Week Live in Birmingham! We look forward to meeting UK industry partners to discuss accelerating the delivery of the energy transition. Reach out if you're curious about how our AI-powered asset analytics can help power grids move towards preventative maintenance based on detailed condition assessments of every power grid component. For more information, visit Utility Week Live in the link below.

Join us at CEATI this week! We'll be at the Strategy & Innovation Conference, meeting with American utilities and tech partners to dive into asset management, energy transition, and the future of power utilities together. For insights on the transformative impact of condition-based assessment asset analytics, connect with Drazen Jurman. See you there! https://lnkd.in/dhpuQ4Kj