Seeq’s $50M Series D Suggests Continued Investor Confidence In GenAI For Industrial Analytics

Seeq's $50M Series D Suggests Continued Investor Confidence In GenAI For Industrial Analytics

On August 6, 2024, Seeq, a Seattle-based industrial analytics vendor, announced the close of its $50 million Series D funding round, led by investment firm Sixth Street Growth, and joined by Altira Group, Insight Partners and Second Avenue Partners.

This Series D round brings Seeq's total funding to $165 million since its founding in 2013. Since then, the firm has established a strong foothold in the industrial advanced analytics market, delivering SaaS solutions to customers in energy, chemicals and pharmaceuticals. Its Series C round closed back in the tech start-up valuation mania of April 2021 - this latest round indicates some market confidence in Seeq's new approach, with the firm pivoting last summer to begin integrating generative AI (GenAI) into its established process analytics and time series machine learning (ML) offerings.

Rather than adding a pop-up OpenAI chatbot wrapper to provide guidance on common issues, Seeq AI Assistant, introduced in February 2024, queries its cleverly indexed documentation through a custom retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) regime. Seeq's product architecture revolves around data science for process industries, incorporating low-code/no-code (LCNC) analytics into its Workbench solution, interactive dashboards with Organizer, and its Python-oriented Data Lab. The benefit to the firm in pursuing GenAI-integrated products stems from off-the-shelf frontier AI models' innate strong performance in data science and code generation. Time series analytics has for years been discussed on the open web, from forum flame wars to academic papers - and everything in between - and provides vast, diverse training data for generative models to ingest and regurgitate effectively.

In addition, Seeq benefits from partnerships with cloud providers AWS and Microsoft, alongside data warehouse provider Databricks, to further AI/ML adoption on a multinational enterprise scale. The firm also partners with low-code application builder Tulip Interfaces for user-friendly apps and dashboards for manufacturing operations.

Proemion acquired Seeq's European rival TrendMiner from Software AG in April 2024 - and there have been some wider investment wins too. Oden Technologies, a plastic extrusions, paper and pulp process analytics and data management solution provider, raised $28 million in April 2024, while manufacturing-focused closed-loop analytics vendor Braincube raised €83 million ($91 million) in December 2023.

Software products where the main feature is GenAI are continuing to struggle. Wrapping a pretty GUI around an API to another firm's LLM isn't an investment opportunity. Real values lies in the 'scaffolding' - the source attribution mechanism, the guardrails, the index and the data models used to feed the model for responses, whether it be text, code or agent instructions - grounded in relevant, up-to-date facts.

As digital transformation continues to win buzzword bingo across the world's industrial boardrooms, Seeq's now well-funded strategy using GenAI sparingly to augment an already robust product means it is well-positioned to move process industries towards better utility of huge, untapped time series data.

Check out recent reports on GenAI and industrial data management: Buyer's Guide: Industrial Data Management Solutions (2024) and Strategic Focus: Low-Code Industrial Analytics Enabled By Generative AI.