Over the past decade, the infrastructure layer of asset-intensive industries has undergone a dramatic change to adopt a more data-driven approach. Propelled by the declining costs of computing power, sensors, data storage, and communication networks, industrial entities are increasingly looking to software solutions to augment their core assets and maintain an edge in a more global and competitive marketplace. This confluence of market forces is leading to groundswell adoption of elementary technological solutions in increasingly distributed industrial applications. These early solutions are proving that a software application approach can dramatically improve operational efficiency, asset utilization, transportation and materials logistics and security at scales never before imagined. While these new technology products generate troves of data, the practical use cases are basic and the majority of intelligence remains largely untapped and insecure within each organization.
The next stage of the industrial technology movement will commute this data from hidden and unstructured organizational depths to the secure application layer. Within the application layer, new software and services will harvest unprecedented intelligence from millions of nodal end points to create solutions and systems at scale that provide greater organizational and economic value. We call this movement, which is in its nascent stages of a decades-long surge, the industrial technology application layer.
The Energize Ventures team fundamentally believes that new businesses are evolving to tackle the growing needs of these broadly defined industrial companies and that the best investors in this space will be individuals and companies that have witnessed the early evolutions of the industrial application layer and are experiencing its benefits as early adopting customers. Furthermore, we believe that having investors, operators, and practitioners with an insider’s perspective on the innovation gaps and intricacies of the infrastructure layer will better position investments to succeed in navigating the complex world of building software solutions serving these markets.
Within the Industrial Technology Application Layer, we are focused on businesses that are or will serve the energy industry but also have widespread applications throughout the industrial ecosystem. We believe that the historical boundary between the energy and industrial industries is vanishing as technology solutions and platforms converge upon the verticals. We are particularly interested in businesses in the following verticals:
Mobility
Cyber Security
Data Analytics
Operational Efficiency
Distributed Energy Resources
Energy Storage
We believe that the most successful businesses will start focusing on a highly specific use case within the energy vertical and will methodically expand to broader industrial markets. If you are an entrepreneur executing on a mission and these thoughts resonate with you, please reach out.
