There was a good profile by the Financial Times on Aveva’s $5bn buyout of OSIsoft from SoftBank and Mitsui.
The acquisition brings scale and diversification to the Schneider Electric-owned Aveva and nice returns to SoftBank after its secondary purchase of shares from VCs Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, TCV and Tola Capital in 2017.
OSIsoft, therefore, is a great and fascinating example of how the tech and venture industry has transformed over the past decade and the trends identified have played out. Software and data really do seem to be eating the world.
The question of if or how OSIsoft worked with other SoftBank assets, or what it could do in future, would be interesting but the bigger opportunity is Aveva turning the data into industrial action for its clients.
In this light we are still scraping the surface of what can be imagined given the developments in deep tech spaces, such as artificial intelligence and quantum computing – as covered by Callum Cyrus in our last AI quarterly.
Rigetti, Oxford Instruments, University of Edinburgh, Phasecraft and Riverlane, backed by government funding, are among those working in these areas, showing the speed of developments since many of them joined the Accenture Ventures-hosted roundtable three years ago, and the power of combining skills between startups, corporations, academia and authorities.
As founder Chad Rigetti told the FT: “Quantum machines today are able to run basic programs, but they’re not yet at the level of performance or scale for commercially relevant problems.
“To unlock the flywheel of economic value requires a full-stack co-design effort, with both academic and private institutions.”
To see the next generation of startups targeting deeptech, as well as financial, energy and sustainability-focused entrepreneurs, join the presentations through GCV Connect powered by Proseeder Technologies on September 22 and 23 with a showcase at the GCV Digital Forum the following week on the 29th.
