HighByte’s $12 Million Series A Funding Highlights Growth In Industrial DataOps Solutions

HighByte’s $12 Million Series A Funding Highlights Growth In Industrial DataOps Solutions

On April 23^rd, 2024, US-headquartered DataOps software provider HighByte announced that it had raised $12 million in a Series A funding round led by Standard Investments, an investment platform focused on industrial technology. Since its founding in 2018, HighByte has received $7.9 million in equity funding, and the provider witnessed triple-digit year-on-year organic growth in 2023. Building upon this success, HighByte plans to use the funding to expand its existing deployments and increase its customer base and market penetration.

Founded by former PTC Kepware executives in 2018, HighByte employs approximately 30 people at its Portland, Maine headquarters. Through its Intelligence Hub, HighByte offers a low-code graphical interface to streamline the aggregation, cleaning and contextualization of data at the edge, followed by delivery to cloud platforms for analytics.

Industrial firms are good at collecting data, but integration can be difficult – 92% of industrial decision-makers in the 2023 Verdantix operational excellence global survey highlight the ability to integrate data from multiple sources and eliminate silos as a significant or very significant challenge for their organization. HighByte’s Intelligence Hub offers connectivity with a plethora of operational technology (OT) data sources, such as AVEVA PI System and InfluxDB time series databases, and via Modbus, MQTT, OPC UA REST and Sparkplug protocols, as well as API integrations with major cloud platforms such as AWS, Microsoft Azure and GCP. HighByte’s solution then leverages a unified namespace architecture to centralize data and maintain a single source of truth (SSOT).

Industrial DataOps and data management platforms are pivotal to successful industrial AI analytics applications – such as failure prediction, production monitoring and energy management – as they ensure that accurate data is delivered to these ML models for insight generation. HighByte offers a low-code graphical interface to automate data cleaning, formatting and transformation tasks.

The steep rise in popularity of generative AI (GenAI) over the past two years has also necessitated the need for robust data management. Copilots and chatbots powered by large language models that have been trained on incomplete, inaccurate, outdated, biased or siloed data can only lead to results with the same faults. SymphonyAI has recently launched IRIS Foundry, a DataOps platform featuring role-based GenAI copilots that are grounded on clean, current and contextualized data delivered by the platform.

Despite a tech bear market impacting funding in the past two years, investment and M&A activity in the industrial data management market is still prevailing, with vendors APERIO and Braincube raising $9 million and $89 million respectively in 2023. Meanwhile, GE Vernova has acquired Greenbird, a data integration platform for utilities, and IBM has made multiple acquisitions to bolster its data management capabilities. 2024 will see acceleration of such activity, with the need for strong data management practices becoming ever more important for successful AI deployments and better asset management.

To learn more about industrial data management solutions, read Verdantix Buyer’s Guide: Industrial Data Management Solutions (2024) report by signing up to Verdantix Vantage.