Verity, an EIC Accelerator Winner, Trains Drones to Check Racks

A dented rack upright in a warehouse is a safety problem, and the conventional way of finding one, as the project summary puts it, relies on manual checks. Verity AG, a Zurich company whose drones already fly through warehouses at night counting pallets, wants the same fleet to find that damage. Its EIC Accelerator project, DELTA, promises what CORDIS describes as "the first system to perform high-resolution, safety-critical racking damage detection directly on-drone", with IKEA as the pilot partner.

The EIC Accelerator selected DELTA at its October 2025 cut-off as a grant-only project. CORDIS records an EU contribution of €2,449,894.41 under grant agreement 101298321, signed on 24 April 2026, for a project running from 1 May 2026 to 30 April 2028. Verity is the only participant listed. The selection was reported in March 2026 alongside three other Swiss companies, Neutrality, Pregnolia and DePoly, after Switzerland's transitional arrangement with Horizon Europe took effect on 1 January 2025.

From stage drones to stock counts

Verity did not start in logistics. Its founder, ETH Zurich professor Raffaello D'Andrea, had co-founded Kiva Systems, the warehouse robot maker Amazon bought for $775 million in 2012, as PopSci and the company's own history page both record. Verity's first market was live entertainment: its drones flew in Cirque du Soleil's Broadway musical Paramour from 2016, more than 390 shows and over 7,000 autonomous flights without a safety incident, according to IEEE Spectrum, which reported an $18 million Series A in June 2018 from Fontinalis Partners, Airbus Ventures, Sony Innovation Fund and Kitty Hawk.

The Zurich commercial register marks the turn. On 31 October 2019 the shareholders renamed Verity Studios AG to Verity AG and rewrote its purpose to the development of indoor drone systems and related technologies for commercial applications. By March 2023, when A.P. Moller Holding led a $32 million Series B with Exor Ventures, about 100 Verity drones were counting stock at 16 IKEA locations in seven countries, including Switzerland, according to TechCrunch's report as republished by ccstartup; PopSci gave the same 16 locations but listed six countries, with the earlier Swiss sites mentioned separately. The round was extended to $43 million in July 2023 with Qualcomm Ventures, per Robotics 24/7 and tech.eu, which put the company's total since late 2015 at about $74 million.

How the drones work, and what DELTA adds

The current product flies without GPS or an operator. Drones lift off from charging stations, originally outside working hours and, in IKEA's upgraded fleet, alongside staff, read pallet barcodes and photograph locations, and the results are matched against the customer's warehouse management system, which flags discrepancies. The International Federation of Robotics, which gave Verity its IERA Award in June 2026, says the drones capture about 500,000 images a day and need two to three battery changes a year. What it replaces, as Verity's UPS case study describes it, is inventory work done with heavy equipment such as forklifts.

DELTA keeps the platform and changes the task. CORDIS names the warehouse safety standards the system is meant to comply with, the European EN 15635 and the American ANSI/RMI MH16.1, and contrasts DELTA with conventional inspection methods that rely on manual checks. The project summary proposes running the full 2D and 3D damage detection on the drone itself, within less than 1 GB of memory, under 100 milliseconds of latency and less than 0.5 Mbps of uplink. The training plan is the part Verity presents as its edge: a "mid-training" stage on about 0.5 million unlabelled images a day from more than 150 facilities, then fine-tuning on more than 10,000 expert-labelled cases from IKEA. Fog nodes would merge views from several drones into 3D, and results would feed a digital twin linked to the customer's warehouse software.

That is the company's claim, not an EIC finding. IKEA's interest is on the record independently: in August 2024 IKEA was developing unit load and rack inspection for its drone fleet, then more than 250 drones in 73 warehouses across nine countries, according to DroneXL. No public document yet shows rack inspection running in any IKEA warehouse.

Customers and the size of the fleet

Verity names four customers in its October 2026 release: IKEA, Maersk, DSV and UPS. The UPS work is documented in two places. A September 2024 report relayed UPS's own announcement of the partnership, and Verity's case study places it at the UPS Velocity facility in Shepherdsville, Kentucky, from July 2024, with a 50% reduction in hours spent on inventory processes. That figure is Verity's, published on its own site.

How many sites Verity serves depends on which page is read. The founder profile on the company's site says over 100 warehouses; its home page and the CORDIS summary say 150 or more facilities; the IFR release in June 2026 says about 200 warehouses, and the company's October 2026 release says more than 200 facilities. Three of the four counts come from Verity's own pages and releases and the fourth from the award release, and no independent count has been published.

What the register shows

The register publications for Verity include no accounts, and the company has published none, so its revenue, losses and audited headcount are not public. The company's About page claims more than 180 team members and more than 150 patents. What the register does show is the capital history. Nominal share capital rose from CHF 714,126 in April 2018 to CHF 1,207,503.66 in May 2023, and then to CHF 1,573,779.09 by a shareholder resolution of 13 May 2026 that created a new class of B+ preference shares, published in the Swiss Official Gazette of Commerce on 20 May 2026. The same entry records two Danish directors, Jan Thorsgaard Nielsen and Rene Falch Olesen, joining the board, and Chetan Mehta leaving it. No 2026 funding round has been announced, and its size is not public.

On 8 October 2026 Verity announced that Anders Martens, who ran the Nordic express company Link Logistics for twelve years after a decade at DHL and TNT, had become chief executive on 1 October, with D'Andrea continuing as chair of the board. Verity's About page also names him chief executive since October 2026. In the release Martens said the technology "is proven" and "running in warehouses today", but that "the market does not yet know what it can do."

The EIC project so far

DELTA is six months into a 24-month grant period. CORDIS lists no deliverables, reports or publications for it, which is normal at this stage and says nothing about progress.

1. Autonomous drone fleet in live warehousesIn place before the grantDeployed with IKEA, UPS and others, per DroneXL and the IFR.
2. On-drone rack damage detection within the stated compute limitsNot yet shownNo test results published; project started 1 May 2026.
3. Fine-tuning on 10,000+ IKEA expert-labelled casesNot yet shownIKEA named as pilot partner on CORDIS; no IKEA statement on DELTA found.
4. Inspection results in a digital twin linked to warehouse softwareNot yet shownNo product page or release describes it.

Why the EU funds a Swiss warehouse drone

Switzerland's place in this round is itself the news. Innosuisse and Euresearch both describe 2025 as the year Swiss companies could take part as EIC Accelerator beneficiaries, and Verity holds its grant under that arrangement. The project summary frames its case around warehouse safety compliance and lower adoption costs from combining inventory and inspection in one platform. Three of Verity's four named customers, IKEA, Maersk and DSV, are European groups. Whether DELTA strengthens European supply chains beyond the companies that use it is a claim the project makes, not something the record can yet test.

The reporting is based on publicly available sources, listed below.