Seeq secures $23mn series B to fuel IIoT advanced analytics growth strategy
Craig Resnick of ARC Advisory Group
Seeq Corporation, a specialist in manufacturing and Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT)advanced analytics software, announced it has secured $23 million (€19.71 million) in Series B funding led by the Altira Group with participation byChevron Technology Ventures, next47, the Siemens-backed global venture firm, Second Avenue Partners and other existing investors. The funding enables Seeq to significantly expand its development, sales and marketing resources, and also increase its presence in international markets.
“Seeq leverages innovations in big data, machine learning, and open source technologies to enable plant operations, engineering and management personnel to find and share insights in a matter of minutes instead of days or weeks,” says Steve Sliwa, CEO and co-founder of Seeq Corporation. “Our collaboration with the Altira Group and other investors speaks to the need for new analytics offerings for manufacturing customers.”
Seeq’s software applications, Seeq Workbench and Seeq Organiser, enable manufacturing organisations to rapidly analyse, predict, collaborate, and distribute insights to improve production outcomes. Seeq is designed to run on-premise, on Microsoft Azure or Amazon Web Services cloud platforms, or in mixed on-premise and on-cloud deployments.
Altira Group, headquartered in Denver, Colorado, has over 20 years of investment experience in oil & gas software and technology startups.
“Seeq is providing an important improvement in software for customers inprocessindustries to accelerate insights, action, and impact on their production and business outcomes,” comments J.P. Bauman, principal at Altira Group. “We are pleased to be leading the effort to enable Seeq’s continued growth.”
Altira’s investment in Seeq is via its Fund VI partnership with a majority of the U.S. super-independent oil & gas operators, including Devon Energy (DVN), Pioneer Natural Resources (PXD), Apache (APA), and EQT (EQT).
“Finding the oil is not the problem;the challenge is producing the oil economically while anticipating fewer available human resources,” observed Chris Cheatwood, executive vice president and CTO at Pioneer Natural Resources. “Seeq empowers our prized engineers, SMEs and managers to more effectively get value out of our data and improve operational efficiency.”
Seeq’s opportunity is the large and growing manufacturing and IIoT analytics market, and has multiple vectors for creating business value:
- Opportunities by industry – Current Seeq customers include oil & gas, chemical, pharmaceutical, pulp & paper, power generation, food & beverage, utilities and discrete manufacturing with remote monitoring/predictive analytics solutions, in countries that span the globe from India to Australia, the U.S., and Europe.
- Opportunities by vendor – Seeq partners with an extensive set of process automation vendors and works with systems sold by OSIsoft, Emerson Automation Solutions, Inductive Automation, Honeywell, Rockwell Automation, AspenTech, Schneider Electric, GE, Siemens, and others.
- Opportunities by audience – Seeq expanded its target audience in 2018 from subject matter experts (e.g., process engineers) to include teams collaborating on projects, managers sharing production reports and analytics across the plant, and data scientists wrangling data for advanced algorithms.
- Opportunities by deployment – Customers may access Seeq’s applications from any modern browser and run the Seeq server application on premise, on a cluster, or in the cloud. This deployment flexibility makes Seeq applicable to any scenario, including customers on a cloud-migration path.
“As seen in ARC Industry Forum presentations, Seeq benefits its customers by making it easier for them to gain and share intelligence from their manufacturing data,” said Craig Resnick, vice president, ARC Advisory Group. “With Altira Group and strategic investors next47 and Chevron Technology Ventures, Seeq is gaining recognition for its ability to help users make better decisions, faster in operating environments.”
Seeq’s latest release, R20, introduces new features enabling support for the integration of structured data from SQL Server, MySQL, and CSV files, as well as easier distribution of Seeq Workbench analyses to coworkers.
To learn more about Seeq Workbench and connectivity options click here
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