Georgian Partners will fund the $22.5 million in a Series B growth-stage investment in the Buffalo company where the capital funds will be used to expand the workforce by 70 employees as well as provide new technical, security and software capabilities within DigitalClone Live, reports North American Wind Power.
Georgian Partners is a thesis-driven growth equity firm investing in SaaS-based business software companies exploiting applied artificial intelligence, security first and conversational business. In a podcast on Thursday, Jon Prial, the Director of Market Insights on the company’s Impact Team, talked with Ward Thomas, the CEO of Sentient Science about data collection and how DigitalClone Live can help businesses to make better decisions.
Sentient Science is a company that’s using the data to extend the remaining useful life of fielded assets like wind turbines and to optimize new product design and testing. Their software currently monitors and provides life-extension actions for over 20,000 wind turbines across 200 projects globally, as well as providing simulations for 440,000 bearings and 100,000 gears within its DigitalClone Live software.
With the DigitalClone Live software, Thomas says an operator can determine the life of gears in a wind turbine as well as produce simulations that cover different scenarios that might impact the machinery in almost any given situation. Sentient Science knows the expected field-life of all the gears and other machinery used in wind turbines and the software makes monitoring much easier.
With the capital funding from Georgian Partners, Sentient Science hopes to expand its operations to 100,000 wind turbines globally through expanded marketing and sales efforts. Among the new hires being planned are a chief financial officer, vice president of software, software developers and sales and marketing staff in the United States, Europe, and China, according to the Buffalo News.
“Ward and his impressive team at Sentient Science have a unique technology and business model that lowers the cost of energy through supply-and-demand integration,” says Simon Chong, managing partner at Georgian Partners. “Their DigitalClone Live software fits perfectly with our thesis area for artificial intelligence, and we look forward to working with Sentient to expand technical capabilities and added value within the core applications.”
Thomas also said that this latest round of funding is a step toward Sentient Science’s ultimate goal of selling stock to the public through an initial stock offering.
