Intertrust Expands CleanGrid™ Artificial Intelligence Toolkit Capabilities by Adding Hepta Airborne’s Drone-based Power Line Inspection Capabilities for Grid Operators

San Francisco and Tallinn, May 3, 2021 –  Hepta Airborne, a leading provider of AI-driven analysis and automated drone inspection technologies, announced today that they are making their world-class drone-based AI system for power inspection available in the Intertrust CleanGrid ™ toolkit. Using Hepta’s advanced AI system, grid operators can inspect power lines with drones and receive actionable intelligence via Hepta’s decision making system. Intertrust CleanGrid is a toolkit for grid operators planning and managing modern grid systems that provides data rights management and security capabilities, a modular architecture for authenticated third party AI apps accessible via a map-based user interface.

Hepta is focused on data acquisition via drones, satellites and dedicated sensors, using field-required AI software analysis to predict network failures. Today, Hepta has inspected more than 40000km of power lines, and trained its algorithms to defect failure sources such as broken power line elements and vegetation encroachment. Dozens of customers around the world rely on Hepta’s technologies and services. Aerial inspection of power lines goes far beyond optimizing grid operations. In a world where climate change has caused serious drought, overgrown vegetation on power lines has caused wildfires that have led to serious loss of life and billions of dollars of financial damage. 

“Inspecting and analyzing power lines is one of the most mission critical roles in a utility; it is also one of the most expensive and risk prone activities grid operators grapple with,” said Henri Klemmer, Hepta Airborne’s chief executive officer. “We provide actionable data and analyses to operators, reducing cost and improving safety. The decisions we enable go far beyond operational efficiencies, and keep grids operating safely in the face of climate change and other operational risks.”

 The data generated by Hepta’s system is very sensitive and typically proprietary. Yet, in many regions the data must be kept securely for audit purposes and subsequent analysis. Since drones can sometimes image personal property and people, privacy of drone collected data is also a major concern. CleanGrid’s data rights management system allows Hepta and its customers to govern the data and manage compliance with local and national regulatory requirements. Furthermore, CleanGrid allows various value chain users to access the data and resulting analysis in a governed fashion, and to combine it with other sensitive data in a manner that complies with regulatory requirements, including the GDPR, data residency,  and various energy regulations that are common in grid operations.

CleanGrid and its AI modules unite distributed big data, powerful visualization and decision making and advanced analytics in one simple, easy-to-use system. Utilities, municipalities and device makers around the world can use CleanGrid to bring their operations into the age of data driven energy and the IoT. 

“Maintaining and upgrading aging power lines is an important and phenomenally expensive and risky process,” said Florian Kolb, Intertrust’s Chief Commercial Officer and General Manager Energy. “This is especially important in a world that is ever more dependent on electricity in the face of climate change, forest fires and other natural disasters – Hepta’s system is a killer app for managing grid lines and we are delighted to partner with them.”  

About Hepta Airborne

Headquartered in Estonia, Hepta Airborne is a deep tech company, dedicated to solving the most complex challenges in infrastructure inspection with artificial intelligence and data science solutions. Founded in 2017 by experienced energy and aerospace executives, the company automates the inspection of power lines and other infrastructure by utilizing drones, helicopters, satellites, and big data analysis, with long-term plans for creating digital twins for a variety of infrastructures. The company offers a full service of grid inspection to DSOs and TSOs, railway, and communication companies, with a monthly inspection scope of 3.000+ kilometers. Hepta’s team comprises 40 software and drone experts, operating in 11 countries from the EU to South-America, and expanding rapidly. The company recently announced a high-level executive Daniel Dobbeni, supervisory board member of the world’s largest sustainable energy accelerator EIT InnoEnergy, joining Hepta Airborne’s Supervisory Board. Additional information: heptaairborne.com, LinkedIn and Twitter. 

About Intertrust

Intertrust provides trusted computing products and services to leading global corporations–from mobile, consumer electronics and IoT manufacturers, to service providers and enterprise software platform companies. These products include the world’s leading digital rights management (DRM), software tamper resistance, and technologies to enable private data exchanges for various verticals including energy, entertainment, retail/marketing, automotive, fintech, and IoT. Founded in 1990, Intertrust is headquartered in Silicon Valley with regional offices in London, Tokyo, Mumbai, Bangalore, Beijing, Seoul, Riga, and Tallinn. The company has a legacy of invention, and its fundamental contributions in the areas of computer security and digital trust are globally recognized. Intertrust holds hundreds of patents that are key to Internet security, trust, and privacy management components of operating systems, trusted mobile code and networked operating environments, web services, and cloud computing. Additional information is available at intertrust.com, or follow us on Twitter or LinkedIn.