Cognite, a provider of structured and contextualized data for industrial applications, today announced that it will enter the North American technology market and open a U.S. headquarters facility this summer.
Global demand for Cognite solutions has gone far beyond the company’s native Norway, as the company is now considering sites in Texas and California for its North American headquarters.
“Our firm has proven the value of unlocking data to create value for industrial enterprises in Europe,” said Francois Laborie, general manager of Cognite North Americas. “We are confident that Cognite can bring a new level of innovation to asset-intensive companies in North America by liberating their industrial data and making an immediate impact through data analytics that have the potential to reduce costs, optimize production and transform their business models.”
For asset-intensive industries like oil and gas, power generation, energy grid management, and shipping, the Cognite platform “liberates” data from sources that include industrial sensors, equipment hierarchies, piping and instrumentation diagrams, 3D models, maintenance logs, and even weather information in order to deliver scalable, accessible, real-time and fully contextualized data for application development, enablement of machine learning, and forging ecosystem connections and partnerships.
Like many European companies, Cognite offers benefits that are beyond the norm of most U.S. companies, and promises to bring those to its U.S. office.
Cognite wants to give its employees European benefits including:
- 5-weeks paid vacation;
- 100% health insurance coverage;
- Paid maternity leave and paid paternity leave;
- Generous 401K matching; and
- A flat organization based on trust.
The North American location will incorporate administrative, field marketing, business development and technical/engineering head count to support new customers and the company’s existing customer base, including customers with a U.S. footprint such as Aker BioMarine and Aker Solutions, TechnipFMC and Wallenius Wilhelmsen.
Concurrent with its entry into the North American market, Cognite has in place key technology and industry partnerships designed to help it rapidly deploy, scale and achieve market awareness.
The Cognite Data Platform is built on the Google Cloud Platform, providing customers with high performance and scalability at a reasonable cost, and, according to Darryl Willis, vice president, Oil, Gas and Energy for Google Cloud, “Cognite has stretched the potential of Google’s technology in the space of industrial data platforms. In a short time, Cognite has proved that data, once made accessible, can provide substantial impact to the industry by accelerating the adaption of AI and making operations safer and more efficient.”
Cognite has also joined the World Economic Forum’s Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution to engage in maximizing the benefits of science and technology for society.
“In January, we welcomed Cognite as a new member of the Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Their vision and expertise fit well with our mission to accelerate the benefits of science and technology for society. We are looking forward to their unique perspective on innovation and collaboration,” said Zvika Krieger, head of technology policy at the World Economic Forum Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
