Caterpillar Venture Capital, the corporate venturing arm of construction equipment maker Caterpillar, has led an $11m series A round for US-based business planning software developer Alight.
The unit led a consortium of undisclosed investors described by Alight as “noted Bay Area tech investors”.
Founded in 2015, Alight has created a software platform that displays the financial effects of different hypothetical business decisions or market changes for a company.
The funding will be used to enhance Alight’s mining and mortgage industry-focused offerings and to move into new industries, with a pharmaceutical-focused tool slated for release in the third quarter of 2017.
Jim Hawkins, Caterpillar’s managing director of mining technology, said: “Alight’s technologies can offer our customers financial applications that speed the ‘what if’ analysis around capital decisions such as machine and technology purchases as well as operational decision making.
“With our leadership on introducing automation to the industry, we have found that mine operators need to better understand the broad benefits coming from automation. Seeing the financial impact of a decision before it’s made will be a great benefit at both the mine site and enterprise levels.”
The company had previously received $1.3m in equity funding and $7.4m in debt financing, according to securities filings. It began raising both rounds in 2015 but closed them in April this year, just before it began raising its latest funding.