Seattle-based industrial analytics company Seeq has closed a $50 million Series C funding round, led by global venture capital and private equity firm Insight Partners. The new funding means the firm, a star of industrial IoT on the venture capital scene, has achieved the (relatively rare) hop, skip, and jump of three-stage ABC seed investment, bringing its total funding to around $115 million since inception.
Existing investors Altira Group, Chevron Technology Ventures, Cisco Investments, Saudi Aramco Energy Ventures, and Second Avenue Partners also participated in the round, which closed last month. Seeq, founded in 2014, raised $24 million from investors at the start of last year, and $23 million in Series B funding in mid-2018. In January, it announced a deal with Philippines-based industrial IoT provider Calibr8 Systems to go after the power and utilities, oil and gas, semiconductor, chemical, and process manufacturing industries.
Janice Abel, principal consultant at market research firm ARC Group, said: “Less than 10-to-18 percent make it to Series C, and less than 22 percent get to Series B funding. A few companies get acquired on the way, but most of them just never get beyond Series A. This makes Seeq’s Series C round impressive and speaks to its advanced analytics offering.”
The company’s software applications, Seeq Workbench and Seeq Organizer, seek to enable industrial organizations to analyze and distribute insights to improve production outcomes. Both are designed to run on-premise, on Microsoft Azure or Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud platforms, or in mixed edge and cloud setups. It is an AWS Industrial Competency Partner, and supports Amazon Redshift, S3, and SageMaker.
It connects to an extensive set of automation vendor data storage platforms for on premise engagements including OSIsoft, Siemens, GE, Honeywell, Emerson Automation Solutions, Inductive Automation, AVEVA, AspenTech, Yokogawa, and others. It builds on machine learning and big data technologies to speed ‘time to insight’. The new funding will increase the company’s presence in international markets, it said.
Steve Sliwa, chief executive and co-founder at Seeq, said: “We are pleased to close our Series C funding efforts with the support of Insight Partners to scale our business and enable manufacturing organizations to make data-driven decisions. By leveraging big data, machine learning, and computer science innovations, Seeq is enabling a new generation of software-led insights.”
Matt Koran, vice president at Insight Partners, commented: “Seeq has established themselves as the leader in process manufacturing and IIoT analytics, and we believe they will continue to transform the way companies find and share insights and make faster decisions. The company has achieved incredible growth to date, and we are excited to partner with them to help execute their vision for a new generation of machine-learning enabled analytics.”
