Energize Ventures is thrilled to announce our $10M participation in the extension of Sitetracker’s Series B financing, bringing the total capital raised in this round to $34M. Sitetracker, the global standard for managing high-volume critical infrastructure projects, previously closed their Series B led by existing investor New Enterprise Associates (NEA) with participation from Wells Fargo Strategic Capital, Salesforce Ventures, and others. With our investment, John Tough is joining the board of directors alongside Matt Langdon, Ravi Viswanathan, Cofounder & CTO Tim May, and CEO Giuseppe Incitti.
Why Now: A Better Approach for Distributed Assets
The telecom industry’s approach to building, operating, and maintaining 5G networks is a playbook for other critical infrastructure verticals. 5G has mobile operators and service providers moving from central sites to tens of millions of relay cell sites strategically placed across the urban environment. Existing software systems meant to monitor the health of telecom infrastructure is built around central assets. Sitetracker is built for the decentralized asset base: high volume, miniaturized asset footprints serviced by an increasingly distributed or outsourced workforce.
Energy, transportation, oil & gas, and other critical infrastructure industries are undergoing a similar asset-base transition:
- Power generation is moving from central power plants to distributed wind, solar and battery installations. And with new construction and maintenance schedules, utilities also need to manage the complexities of distributed energy interconnection requests
- Transportation is moving from gas stations to a highly distributed electric vehicle charging footprint; in addition to autonomous driving demands for 5G networks
- Upstream oil &gas extraction sites are becoming more numerous and disparate due to unconventional production techniques
- Cities are moving from generic services to wireless-enabled smart city services and sensors / monitoring
As the asset landscape moves from centralized to distributed infrastructure, the tools built to manage and maintain those projects need to evolve. Sitetracker’s project and work management tools directly service these needs as the software is purpose-built for high volume, distributed assets.
Customer-Driven Philosophy and Best in Class Team
Critical infrastructure customers have unique pain points that traditional technology vendors may not appreciate. When Energize was looking at the market of software companies helping these industries manage their new asset base, our top criterion was an executive team that respected the customer, the sales cycle, and the impact potential of their product. We quickly learned of SiteTracker’s customer-obsessed and value-oriented ethos, exemplified best by CEO Giuseppe Incitti and Cofounder & CTO Tim May. The Sitetracker team knows the importance of their software and over invests in customer delivery, training, and education.
Energize was fortunate to see how Sitetracker on-boarded and delivered value to one of our portfolio companies, Volta Charging. Volta Charging is growing at an incredible pace and needed better software to manage their increasing number of distributed, electric vehicle stations. With the goal of having an agile, central workforce, Volta employs ~200 third-party contractors for construction and maintenance of their charger network. Sitetracker’s cloud-based asset management software allows Volta to put the “asset at the center” and manage the construction and maintenance complexity.
Energize’s investment will accelerate Sitetracker’s product roadmap to address a broader set of project and work management needs across the asset lifecycle and expand business operations globally.
The continuing shift to “distributed” assets positions Sitetracker to capitalize on the immense opportunity in the energy sector, as similar trends in telecom that necessitated a better project and work management solution are echoed in power, oil & gas, and transportation. Our experience navigating buying cycles and sales in the energy sector will help position Sitetracker for success. Sitetracker aligns tightly with our thesis that technology can solve problems that permeate not only power and energy companies, but critical infrastructure providers writ large. Energize is confident that Sitetracker will streamline the deployment and management of critical infrastructure.
