Energize Ventures is thrilled to formally announce our Series B investment into SparkCognition. One of the fastest growing AI companies in the country, SparkCognition builds artificial intelligence applications that deliver actionable insights to solve business-critical solutions for companies in energy, oil and gas, manufacturing, finance, aerospace, defense and cyber security. The Series B capital raise totaled $56.6M with participation from existing investors Verizon Ventures, Brevan Howard, and CME Ventures. The Invenergy Future Fund joined the round alongside new investors State Bank Investments and Cisco veterans John Chambers and Pankaj Patel. We are delighted to work alongside Amir Husain, Founder & CEO of SparkCognition, to support and enable the Company into the future. Amy Francetic is taking a Board Observer position with SparkCognition.
The Fund’s relationship with SparkCognition goes back many years. In 2014, when Amy Francetic was running the Clean Energy Trust, she introduced Amir Husain to Invenergy with a goal for SparkCognition to identify ways to enhance operations & maintenance schedules of wind farm assets. Now, SparkCognition software is in ongoing pilots on nearly 1,000 wind turbines across the Invenergy fleet. The applications of the technology have proven to be industry-agnostic and widely applicable and go beyond predictive analytics to natural language processing and endpoint security. SparkCognition’s applications are also in use by other world-class asset owners like Honeywell and Boeing, demonstrating the reach and capability of the platform.
With over 230 employees, SparkCognition has scaled quickly over the past few years to serve nearly 100 world-class customers. Growing at this pace with aspirations to become a transformative technology company takes exceptional leadership. Throughout our engagement with the team, we have been impressed with employees at every level of the organization from industry leaders like Wendy Anderson, Dr. David Asher, and Usman Shuja to the operations and customer success teams working with Randy Printz and Sumant Kawale. While all of the team recognizes the power of the underlying SparkCognition technology, it is the management team’s insistence on ensuring the powerful technology truly addresses the problems of SparkCognition’s customers that separates SparkCognition from the competition. That customer-product approach to delivering new technology is refreshing for the data analytics and broader AI industries, and the manner in which SparkCognition expands its product and revenue reach within large companies is indicative of this strength.
As part of Energize Ventures’ promise to our portfolio companies, we have and will continue to introduce SparkCognition to our network of energy and industrial companies. We firmly believe in the people, the product and the market opportunity ahead and are excited to support Amir and the team along the way.
