Cognite raises $150M to digitize industrial operations

Cognite, an industrial software-as-a-service (SaaS) company, today announced it has raised $150 million in an equity funding round led by TCV at a $1.6 billion post-money valuation. The company says this investment marks one of the largest funding rounds for a SaaS company in Europe and will be used to expand the company’s platform and support hiring efforts.

According to a 2020 PricewaterhouseCoopers survey, companies in manufacturing expect efficiency gains over the next five years attributable to digital transformations. McKinsey’s research with the World Economic Forum puts the value creation potential of manufacturers implementing “Industry 4.0” — the automation of traditional industrial practices — at $3.7 trillion in 2025.

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

Cognite’s DataOps platform combines machine learning, rules engines, and subject-matter expertise to convert data into insights. It finds relationships in domain data, representing industrial entities in a connected, labeled property graph. Cognite customers can configure pipelines for continuous AI-driven entity matching and diagram parsing, as well as unstructured document rendering that helps identify tags and similar objects and extract text and patterns.

Beyond this, Cognite lets companies bring existing machine learning models onto the platform and provides a dashboard for production optimization. Data scientists can build, train, test, deploy, and manage models and leverage “physics-guided” machine learning and process simulations to synthesize additional data. Cognite also offers an in-field AI assistant for field workers and tools for remote operations asset management, including tools to extract operational data directly from source systems while integrating it with data from data warehouses and data lakes to calculate statistical features.

Digital transformation

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

Cognite’s customer base includes BP, Saudi Aramco, Alfa Laval, Statnett, and Mitsubishi. Recently, the Lysaker, Norway-based company — which claims it’s among the fastest-growing software companies in the world with over 500 employees — formed a partnership with Microsoft to use Microsoft Azure hosting solutions and a collaboration with Accel to “unlock the potential” of industry data.

“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.”

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