Cognite's $150 Million Investment And $1.6 Billion Valuation Points To Growing Demand For Industrial Data Management Offerings

Cognite's $150 Million Investment And $1.6 Billion Valuation Points To Growing Demand For Industrial Data Management Offerings

If data is the new oil as many commentators have said, then industrial firms are still burning it for lamps, while other industries have invented the internal combustion engine. Industrial firms have gained value from their asset data is for multiple usage scenarios from predicting asset failure to undertaking decisions on capital investment planning. However, insights derived from data are only as good as the quality of data itself, which in an industrial facility can exist within different systems, be incomplete and not be mapped to the right equipment. Data Operations (DataOps) is a real-time approach to data management where all relevant functions work together to ensure data quality and accessibility.

Cognite, an Oslo-headquartered industrial software provider, offers a software platform to help IT, data scientists, and engineering functions collaborate and derive value from asset data. Cognite is part-owned by Norwegian oil exploration firm Aker BP, and in 2020 raised $75 million from Accel, a venture capital investor. Cognite offers an industrial DataOps platform called Cognite Data Fusion (CDF) that enables the contextualisation of data of operational data. Cognite has also developed a suite of software applications on top of CDF for maintenance optimisation, workflow support, and remote work. Aker BP achieved 80% reduction in the time engineers spent performing manual tests at its Valhall field and 50% decrease in the duration of an average maintenance session after implementing solutions from Cognite.

In May 2021, Cognite raised $150 million from TCV, a technology investment firm, to further enhance its offerings as well as expand into new regions. This round valued Cognite at $1.6 billion, placing it firmly in the unicorn bracket. Cognite can use this capital to scale its offerings to take advantage of the sprint to digitization that was accelerated by the Covid-19 pandemic and recession. In a Verdantix survey of 259 senior managers in operations, maintenance and engineering roles, 44% responded that they are accelerating their digitization programmes across multiple areas following COVID-19 and recession, and 36% said they were making new targeted digital investments following the same. This is driving industrial firms to invest in DataOps strategies as part of their asset management digitization programmes and subsequently shaping software supplier strategies. Uptake, the US-headquartered industrial AI software provider acquired ShookIOT in February 2021 to help industrial firms unlock the value of data quicker, while Seeq, the Seattle-headquartered IIoT analytics provider raised $50 million in Series C funding in April 2021.

For more information attend the Verdantix webinar titled ‘The Evolving Maintenance Analytics Software Landscape: Key Vendor Offerings And Capabilities’