Chicago-based predictive analytics startup Uptake has announced a $117 million Series D round led by UK venture capital firm Baillie Gifford. The fundraising round was also joined by existing investors Revolution Growth, led by AOL co-founder Steve Case and GreatPoint Ventures.
The new funding brings Uptake’s total amount of venture capital to approximately $260 million. The three-year-old startup founded by two co-founders of Groupon, is now valued around $2.3 billion.
The SaaS provider uses machine learning to spot inefficiencies in industrial machinery. Its systems read data that machines put out, passing it through a larger set of algorithms in order to generate meaningful insight so that clients can maintain their systems better and save significant costs in the meantime. Working across six continents, Uptake lists dozens of industrial business customers including Berkshire Hathaway Energy, Caterpillar and Panduit. The firm, which says it is already cash-flow positive, will use the new funding to go after “big markets like gas and energy,” said Uptake’s VP of communications, Abigail Hunt, in an interview with TechCrunch.
“IoT is today an opportunity that is worth billions of dollars, and it will be in the trillions of dollars in the coming years,” said Hunt.
CEO and co-founder Brad Keywell wrote in a statement that there is “virtually nothing standing in our way from being the predictive analytics market leader across every heavy industry, from oil & gas to mining and beyond… The opportunity is too significant for us to not double down right now.”
The deal is unique in the sense that the lead investor is a large scale asset manager rather than a typical venture capital or growth equity firm. Edinburgh-based Baillie Gifford is also a late-stage investor in tech giants Airbnb, Lyft, Spotify and HelloFresh.
