Indoor Robotics, the EIC Accelerator and the Indoor Drone Promise

Indoor Robotics, a start-up from Ramat Gan near Tel Aviv, built a drone that patrols the inside of buildings and then docks upside down on the ceiling, where it keeps watching as a 360-degree security camera. In the EIC Accelerator pilot round of 8 January 2020 it was one of the Israeli companies selected for blended finance, a grant plus equity, for the project TANDO, according to the European Commission's list of selected companies, which names no other beneficiary for the project. The EU contributed €2,444,400 towards a total cost of €3,492,000, and the project ran from 1 July 2020 to 30 June 2022, according to CORDIS.

The drone worked and found buyers. By the end of the project the company reported 11 paying installations, including ADT in the United States, G4S in Canada and Intel in Israel, and 43 full-time staff, in its final report on CORDIS. A $15 million Series A followed. Yet the company is no longer operating: the Israeli company register lists Indoor Robotics Ltd as in voluntary liquidation, according to the Corporations Authority open data and KYC Israel.

Where Indoor Robotics Stands Now

Indoor Robotics has stopped trading. The Israeli Corporations Authority's open data gives the company's status as "בפרוק מרצון", in voluntary liquidation, with 2023 as the last year for which an annual report was filed, and lists the founder Doron Ben-David as the contact at the registered address; KYC Israel shows the same status. A voluntary liquidation is a winding-up decided by the shareholders, not an insolvency proceeding opened by a court; the date on which it began is not in the free register data. OpenCorporates still shows the company as active, which contradicts the register's own open data and appears to reflect an older update.

The Israeli start-up database Startupim records the company as "Non Active, Feb 2025 ceased to operate" and notes that both founders have left. The company's website, indoor-robotics.com, no longer loads. Its last archived version in the Wayback Machine, from December 2024, shows a newest post dated 31 July 2024 and a "We are hiring!" banner. No announcement by the company of its closure, a sale of its assets or a buyer for its patents could be found.

The Technology: A Drone That Hangs From the Ceiling

Indoor security today rests on fixed cameras and sensors, which see only what is in front of them, and on guards who walk rounds. Ground robots can patrol, but furniture, stairs and shelves block them. Tando took a different route: a small drone that flies set patrol routes or investigates an alarm, then docks on the ceiling, where it serves as a stationary security camera, according to The Robot Report. It carried a 360-degree camera, as Ice reported in 2021, plus thermal and environmental sensors, and fed a cloud-based anomaly detection system meant to spot unauthorised people, heated wires, temperature changes and water leaks, according to the company's CORDIS report.

The ceiling dock is the core of the company's intellectual property. Google Patents shows US patent 11,783,719, "Device and system for docking an aerial vehicle", granted to Indoor Robotics Ltd on 10 October 2023 with the two founders as inventors. The CORDIS report says the company had filed 15 patent applications in 11 countries by June 2022, five of them granted. Its claims that Tando was "4x cheaper" than ground robots and could cut fatalities and insurance claims by 50% come from the company and have not been independently tested in any public source.

What the EIC Project Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

The CORDIS objective describes Tando as a "holistic solution" for active monitoring of premises at "less than 25% the cost of current solutions". The project ended on schedule on 30 June 2022, and its final periodic report gives specific results. Tando had reached technology readiness level 8, "first commercial installations", and was being made in small batches. The company said a serial manufacturing line was "work in progress" and that it expected the first fully industrialised TRL9 units "toward EOY 2022". It had 11 paying installations, five of them at Intel, which started with one system in early 2021, and had built a ten-person manufacturing team.

Part of that record can be checked outside CORDIS. ADT Commercial announced on 27 March 2023 that Movado Group, the watchmaker, had made the first pilot purchase of the autonomous indoor drones it sells under its EvoGuard brand, developed "in collaboration with Israel-based Indoor Robotics", after testing them at a New Jersey distribution centre since June 2022, according to ADT and SDM Magazine. In February 2021 the Israeli security company Team 3 announced a partnership with Indoor Robotics, according to Ice. The G4S and Intel installations are named only in the company's own report; no statement by either customer could be found.

1. Commercial ceiling-docking security droneDeliveredTRL8 and 11 paying installations by June 2022 (CORDIS); ADT pilot sale to Movado in March 2023.
2. Patent protectionDelivered15 applications, 5 granted by June 2022, per CORDIS; US docking patent granted October 2023.
3. Serial production (TRL9) by the end of 2022Not achievedNo serial manufacturing line or TRL9 product was ever announced.
4. 50% fewer fatalities and insurance claimsNot achievedNo data on fire or leak outcomes at customer sites was published.
5. Market scale-up after the projectNot achievedOperations ended in February 2025; the company is in voluntary liquidation.

Credit is due: in two years a seed-stage company took a new kind of flying robot from prototype to paid installations at large security and technology companies, on time. What the grant was meant to start, a manufactured product sold at scale, did not follow.

After the Grant: A Series A and a Software Turn

In June 2022, as the project closed, Indoor Robotics announced a $15 million Series A led by Pitango with Target Global, Spider Capital and the "European Innovation Council Fund", to move Tando into full production and build its go-to-market, according to Dronelife, Help Net Security and The Robot Report. Pitango's managing partner Rami Kalish said his fund had increased its investment "following the successful launch of Tando".

The EIC Fund's own list of invested companies, checked on all 17 pages for this article, does not include Indoor Robotics. Whether the EIC equity component of the blended award was invested and the company later removed from the list, or whether the release named the fund for another reason, could not be verified. The amount of any EIC equity is not public.

The total raised is also unclear. The company announced $15 million; databases give $18 million for the Series A (Fundable), $20.34 million over five rounds (CB Insights) and $24 million in total (Startupim). None of these figures comes with a company statement after June 2022.

By 2024 the company was selling software as much as the drone. Its about page described Control Bridge as "the operating system for indoor monitoring and inspection", and in April 2024 Control Bridge won the Drone and Robot Solutions for Security category of the Security Industry Association's New Products and Solutions Awards at ISC West, according to the company and SDM Magazine. That release quoted Ofir Bar-Levav as CEO; when he replaced Ben-David is not public. CB Insights lists a December 2023 place in Deloitte's Launchpad programme, which the company also announced on its website. Ten months after the SIA award, Startupim records the end of operations.

Why Europe Should Care

Israel was associated to Horizon 2020, which made Israeli companies eligible for the EIC pilot on the same terms as EU firms, according to the Commission's list of associated countries. Indoor drones fit the Commission's Drone Strategy 2.0 of 29 November 2022, which counts inspection and surveillance among the services of a drone market it estimates could be worth €14.5 billion with 145,000 jobs by 2030, and which calls for a technology roadmap "to reduce existing strategic dependencies and avoid new ones arising", as Polis reported. Tando's customers named in public sources, however, were in the United States, Canada and Israel. No European deployment of Tando was found.

The Verdict

Indoor Robotics, its founders and the EIC have not been asked for comment for this article. It is based entirely on public records, company statements and EU project data, linked throughout.