A win for Renewables: SparkCognition acquires Ensemble Energy
SparkCognition is a world-class technology company, based down in Austin. The company helps drive growth or expand margin for their customers by leveraging award-winning machine learning technology, proven artificial intelligence systems, and a multinational team of AI thought leaders.
The company has an incredible respect for the customer and looks to create industry-specific customer collaborations to better customize their AI models for industry-relevant use cases and value. Some of those public customer-model collaborations include bp in oil & gas operations, and Nomura and the London Stock Exchange in finance. Perhaps my favorite example is how SparkCognition works with Mitsubishi Power to better automate predictive analytics for power generation.
Energize invested in SparkCognition about 3.5 years ago. At the time we had strong conviction that Amir Husain and his team would become the default AI-enabled predictive analytics engine for the energy industry. Since we invested they have done just that with customers in utilities and oil & gas. One area that requires very specific industry expertise is the renewables market. Why? Wind turbines operate quite differently than any other turbines. Similarly, solar array performance and predictive models therein require very specific customer sets. And, the data sets for these types of assets are actually quite young, with a low level of failures. That means that the value for a predictive analytics engine to help operators estimate unit failure and schedule the optimal predictive maintenance schedule is increasingly valuable.
Enter Ensemble Energy. Led by Sandeep Gupta, Ensemble provides AI-enables asset management and predictive maintenance solutions for the energy industry. They provide these services on over 3,500 MW of wind and solar assets for firms like Sempra Energy, EDF, RenNew Energy, and others.
The combination of Ensemble Energy’s renewable awareness and SparkCognition’s AI engines and commercial footprint is a brilliant combination. These two firms will better serve the energy transition from end-to-end: making oil & gas exploration more efficient and secure…optimizing utility scale power plants… and now helping optimize new wind and solar assets. The energy industry will benefit from this combination through more efficient operations, less downtime.. and ultimately a more reliable energy and power ecosystem.
The press release can be seen here: SparkCognition Acquires Ensemble Energy to Accelerate Renewable Energy Growth Using Artificial Intelligence