HUVRdata announced on Tuesday it raised $5 million.
The Austin-based industrial asset management platform plans to invest the Series A round in growing its team and developing its tech. CEO Bob Baughman said the cash comes as the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated demand for the startup, as its customers are trying to do more with less.
“The people that are operating the refineries, the plants, the wind turbines, etc, they have to maintain those assets and actually increase their production, and do that all with less resources,” Baughman told Built In. “That spells one thing: More automation, more software and more analytics.”
Founded in 2014, HUVRdata, which goes by the company name HUVR, helps customers like ExxonMobile standardize and digitize the inspection processes for large equipment, like oil refinery tanks. By consolidating inspection data — for every tank, across all of the company’s global refineries — into a single platform, Baughman said HUVR helps Exxon predict how a tank will degrade, when it will need maintenance and the cost of maintaining the systems across its entire company.
Unlike large competitors IBM Maximo, SAP and Oracle, Baughman said HUVR is also able to include and analyze image data collected from drones and thermal cameras. And unlike smaller competitors like Cyberhawk, HUVR is able to include data from multiple systems into a single space, Baughman said. Customers achieve a tenfold return-on-investment within their first year of deploying HUVR, he added.
“Our analytics platform allows them now to spend their budget more effectively, and get in front of the problems that are being caused by all the depreciations,” Baughman said.
During the fourth quarter, Baughman said the startup aims to introduce an updated edge analytics engine for its customers operating in the wind turbine inspection space — allowing clients to view all the blade defects loaded into HUVR, predict the energy loss associated with the broken blades, forecast the cost estimated to repair them and understand the production gain they could achieve by fixing them. The company also plans to upgrade its user interface to make it easier for companies’ field technicians to record inspection data.
“We have technicians that are in very harsh, very unsafe, very environmentally sensitive areas,” Baughman said. “We need a user interface that the technician can look at and use very simply with their gloves on.”
The 13-person startup plans to triple its workforce over the next year, with plans to hire sales and marketing professionals, software engineers and data scientists.
The Series A round brings total investment in HUVRdata to $9 million. Cottonwood Venture Partners led the round, with participation from Wild Basin Investments.
