Last week, an Energize Ventures portfolio company, Awake Security announced it was acquired by Arista. Arista is a networking company with a $15 billion market cap based in Santa Clara. Awake Security’s CEO, Rahul Kashyap, is a visionary cybersecurity executive and a great leader. Energize Ventures participated in Awake’s most recent capital raise. That round …
How much does a wind operator spend on a wind turbine per year? I posed this question to 3 of the largest wind operators in North America. Here was the range of feedback: “That is a very loaded question as it completely depends on the breadth of scope for turbine O&M on the wind side.“ …
Yesterday I wrote about the 3 different ways to expand growth in an energy and industrial account. I highlighted that “Product-led growth tends to be the most stepwise in commercial advancements.” Today I wanted to highlight the techniques that I have seen work well in accelerating a software company’s march through the rest of the …
If a start-up is targeting the energy and industrial verticals, they better be prepared for the 9+ month sales cycle. And when the start-up finally wins the account with a core product, the celebration needs to be brief. While these customers do tend to have high retention, all of that upfront work earns the entrepreneurs …
I am a big fan of Ty Findley and the work he is doing as a Managing Partner of IRONSPRING. Ty was recently on an episode of Full Ratchet with Nick Moran. On the episode Ty referenced some of the work on industrial technology exits… and gave me one of my better nicknames “Digital Industrial …
The purpose for this series is to highlight the traditional industrial technology firms that are re-accelerating growth through M&A. I will be covering 3 firms, and there may be an encore. Earlier this month I covered the first of the firms, Rockwell Automation. This week I am covering… Honeywell. Honeywell is a Charlotte, North Carolina …
Amidst the dozens of SPACs and high flying technology deals, an under the radar industrial software company went public last week and very few noticed. The company is Bentley Systems, is headquartered in Exton, Pennsylvania and as over 4,000 employees worldwide. Bentley is a leading provider of software for infrastructure engineering, enabling the work of …
In Matt Ridley’s book, he talks about how larger infrastructure projects have a higher likelihood to get bogged down with excess costs. The costs begin in permitting and ultimately show up in another, comparative form: Smaller form assets allow for greater iteration during development and more adjustments while in operation- continuously lowering costs. This tweaking …
A few weeks back I indicated how I hoped that ChargePoint would have a successful market debut. Well, here we are! ChargePoint is about to hit the public market with their Switchback Energy reverse merger. The company released some basic information and is aiming to go public at a $2.4 billion valuation and is raising …
Some of my recent posts here caught the attention of an editor at Forbes that I admire. She asked me to begin posting 1-2x per month on the energy and industrial transition. Yesterday, post #1 went live, and is titled: “The Royal Energy Wedding: Tesla should acquire NextEra Energy” The link can be found here. …