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Seek And Ye Shall Find: Seeq Secures $23M To Advance IIoT Manufacturing

By Cynthia S. Artin
July 18, 2018

Four top investment firms, Altira Group, Chevron Technology Ventures, Second Avenue Partners and next47, the Siemens-backed global venture firm  today added growth capital fuel into Seeq Corporation, in a Series B round totaling $23M. While details on specific uses of funds have not been disclosed, the company stated the additional financing will “significantly expand its development, sales and marketing resources, and also increase its presence in international markets.”

Seeq focused early on the Industrial IoT (IIoT) space and last month released their second update to Seeq this year and delivers quarterly updates – while also announcing they hired a new managing director for European operations.

Seeq is an advanced analytics solution for engineers and scientists in process manufacturing organizations to connect to, analyze and share insights on manufacturing data.

While their IIoT focus is tight, their vertical industry focus is broader and includes oil & gas, pharmaceutical, chemical, energy, mining, food and beverage, and other industries.

Recent releases of Seeq have focused on enabling larger deployments through scalability features in the software, including the ability to have live updates to Seeq Topics, which are a way to publish insights from Seeq to other users.


They also recently expanded machine learning functionality for predictive analytics and an improved query model for customers bringing in contextual data from SQL-based data sources to provide faster connections to big data sources.

The “Seeq R20” update also includes new integration support for Inductive Automations’ Ignition SCADA system including integrated display window capabilities. (Ignition is an innovative SCADA platform used in more than 100 countries, and is the first universal industrial application platform with unlimited potential. Ignition empowers industrial organizations around the world and in virtually every industry, with an outstanding software platform and top-notch support).

In addition to Inductive Automation, Seeq continues to partner with many leading process automation firms including Emerson Electric, Honeywell, Schneider Electric, and OSIsoft. Seeq also provides support for all leading data historians, making it the most widely accessible and extensively used advanced analytics solution among process manufacturing companies.

The company has been operating since 2013, and in the last five years took a scientific approach to developing and publishing Seeq, used by engineers and operations analysts understand and improve manufacturing processes.  

“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 Organizer, enable manufacturing organizations to rapidly analyze, predict, collaborate on, 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, and were attracted to Seeq given what J.P. Bauman, Principal, given that “Seeq is providing an important improvement in software for customers in process industries to accelerate insights, action, and impact on their production and business outcomes.”

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.”

Rationale for the new investment includes opportunities by industry (oil & gas, chemical, pharmaceutical, pulp & paper, power generation, food & beverage, utilities and more) and

opportunities by vendor (OSIsoft, Emerson Automation Solutions, Inductive Automation, Honeywell, Rockwell Automation, AspenTech, Schneider Electric, GE, Siemens, and more).

“Seeq puts data science in the hands of our engineers, freeing up our data science team and providing faster time to insights,” said James Li, Manager, Core Systems Technology, Abbott Nutrition.

The company is also planning to expand their outreach beyond technical subject matter experts (engineers) to include teams collaborating on projects, managers sharing production reports and analytics across the plant, and data scientists “wrangling data” for advanced algorithms.

“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.”




Edited by Ken Briodagh
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Contributing Writer

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