Cognite raises $150M to digitize industrial operations

Cognite, an industrial computer software-as-a-service (SaaS) business, today announced that it raised $150 million in an equity funding round led by TCV at a $1.6 billion post-dollars valuation. This investment, which marks one of the biggest funding rounds for a SaaS business in Europe, Cognite says, will be used to expand the company’s platform and help hiring efforts.

According to a 2020 PricewaterhouseCoopers survey, providers in manufacturing anticipate efficiency gains more than the next 5 years attributable to digital transformations. McKinsey’s research with the World Economic Forum puts the worth creation possible of companies implementing “Industry 4.0” — the automation of classic industrial practices — in their operations at $3.7 trillion in 2025.

Cognite, which was founded in 2016, supports the information-driven transformation of asset-intensive industries like oil and gas, energy and utilities, and manufacturing. Its core solution is a DataOps and contextualization platform developed to place raw information into context, enabling the creation of apps and services “at scale.”

Cognite’s DataOps platform combines machine understanding, guidelines engines, and topic-matter experience to convert information into insights. It finds relationships in domain information, representing industrial entities in a connected, labeled house graph. Cognite clients can configure pipelines for continuous AI-driven entity matching and diagram parsing, as nicely as unstructured document rendering that assists to recognize tags, related objects, and extract text and patterns.

Beyond this, Cognite lets providers bring current machine understanding models onto the platform and offers a dashboard for production optimization. Data scientists can create, train, test, deploy, and handle models and leverage “physics-guided” machine understanding and course of action simulations to synthesize further information. Cognite also delivers an in-field AI-assistant for field workers and tools for remote operations asset management, like tools to extract operational information straight from supply systems, which integrating it with information from information warehouses and information lakes to calculate statistical features.

Digital transformation

Manufacturing is undergoing a resurgence as business enterprise owners look to modernize their factories and speed up operations. According to ABI Research, more than 4 million commercial robots will be installed in more than 50,000 warehouses about the world by 2025, up from below 4,000 warehouses as of 2018. Oxford Economics anticipates 12.5 million manufacturing jobs will be automated in China, when McKinsey projects machines will take upwards of 30% of these jobs in the U.S.

Cognite’s buyer base involves BP, Saudi Aramco, Alfa Laval, Statnett, and Mitsubishi. Recently, the Lysaker, Norway-based business — which claims it is amongst the quickest-developing computer software providers in the world with more than 500 personnel — formed a partnership with Microsoft to use Microsoft Azure hosting options and a collaboration with Accel to “unlock the potential” of information in market.

“Cognite is on a strong trajectory to help transform industry, and since our founding four years ago, we have managed to attract top global talent, and partner with top industrial companies to accelerate modern industrial data management worldwide,“ CEO and cofounder John Markus Lervik said in a press release. “The partnership with TCV allows us to amplify our software solutions to empower asset-intensive businesses to improve their sustainability and profitability of operations.”

Originally appeared on: TheSpuzz