Austin’s HUVR lands $5 million for asset management platform

HUVRdata Inc. has raised $5 million to expand its platform that lets industrial companies collect and analyze vast amounts of inspection data.

The Austin-based company, which does business as HUVR, develops software used by alternative energy, oil and gas, maritime and other energy and industrial sectors.

HUVR, pronounced "hover," allows customers to aggregate inspection data into a single platform to manage the maintenance of equipment such as wind turbines, pipelines, sea vessels and solar energy plants.

The platform lets users analyze the data, which is derived from a variety of sources including inspection tools such as drones, third-party service data and asset management databases.

Customers include ExxonMobile; German power producer RWE and renewable and wind-energy provider EDP Renewables.

“HUVR was built alongside our customers’ operations teams — designed from the ground up to be simple to use, flexible to implement and valuable from day one,” said Bob Baughman, HUVR co-founder and CEO. “The vision was to have asset owners own their own asset data, and, more importantly, to use their data to make business decisions.”

Founded in 2014, HUVR began by providing drone services to help wind farm owners record and analyze data at industrial sites.

Baughman said the HUVR shifted its model in response to customers.

“(They said) we want to license your platform as our own asset management inspection platform,” he said. “We pivoted 100% into the software-as-a-service market.”

Cottonwood Venture Partners, based in Houston, led the Series A financing. HUVR previously raised $3.5 million in seed funding from investors including the Central Texas Angel Network, the Houston Angel Network and the Texas HALO Fund.

Baughman said HUVR is seeing increased demand amid the coronavirus pandemic.

“Everyone needs to do more with less, they need to inspect their assets at the (same) rate or greater than they were doing, but do it more efficiently,” he said. Using HUVR, customers “don’t have to go in with a clipboard and a piece of paper. We save them hours on the ingestion portion of the data. Once the data is in, the report is automatically generated.”

HUVR will use the funding to accelerate product development and build out its sales and marketing team, with plans to triple the company’s 13-person workforce over the next 12 months, Baughman said.