Cognite’s Impact in 2024: Driving the Future of Industrial AI

2024 was a remarkable year, highlighted by strong SaaS ARR growth. We finished the year just shy of $100M, up $26M or 38% YOY.

Our success stems from a clear competitive edge: differentiated value through core data modeling and AI-driven innovation. Backed by strong market opportunities, proven go-to-market motion, rapid product development, and world-class delivery, these strengths drive customer value and sustain our leadership as we invest in growth.

The Market Opportunity

The industrial landscape is undergoing a paradigm shift. Customers are moving from IoT platform-centric approaches to flexible, scalable solutions that integrate seamlessly across operations. Cognite is uniquely positioned to lead this transformation, with Cognite Data Fusion® serving as the foundational platform for industrial AI and data solutions.

At the start of 2025, Cognite was named a Leader in Industrial Data Management Solutions by the independent research firm Verdantix. In their report, Cognite Data Fusion® received a perfect 3 out of 3 score in data modeling for its exceptional ability to represent entire facilities as digital twins within an industrial knowledge graph. 

This capability is a critical enabler for the next wave of AI-driven transformation, the natural evolution of digital transformation—a product and market category where we have consistently led the way. As industry shifts, Cognite is once again at the forefront, driving this next phase and positioning ourselves strongly for 2025 and beyond.

Market demand for AI is also evolving, with fewer speculative buyers and more focused investments targeting high-ROI use cases. As Gartner put it at their recent IT Symposium: “CIOs are in a race to deliver AI outcomes safely and at scale.” The convergence of AI, data, and digital transformation presents significant opportunities for Cognite, particularly in operational and enterprise-wide unstructured data applications.

Cognite’s deep expertise in operational data management and hybrid AI—combining generative AI with process and simulation models—gives us a distinct edge. Our ability to deliver scalable, repeatable solutions aligns us with the highest-value areas for AI innovation, ensuring we remain at the forefront of this transformative market.

By focusing on our competitive edge and honing our core data modeling and AI capabilities, we will unlock new opportunities and deliver exceptional value as market dynamics evolve.

Proven Go-to-Market Execution.

With a focused, repeatable go-to-market strategy, we enable efficient deal closures, predictable value delivery, and confident scaling across industries.

We landed a new deal with one of the world’s largest manufacturers to create a scalable industrial data foundation that unlocked $360M in potential value and delivered measurable operational improvements, including enhanced process control and predictive analytics.

We expanded our partnership with a global energy leader, finalizing a 12-month renewal agreement six months early. This enterprise-wide deployment drove a 300% increase in monthly active users and delivered over $10M in realized value in 2024.

Finally, we scaled one of the world’s largest chemical producers across 49 manufacturing sites, delivering more than 50 use cases, including an AI Co-Pilot, a generative AI-powered remote operations control room, and Field Operations tools that have been fully adopted by 77% of sites. This partnership delivered tens of millions in savings, exceeding expectations on both realized value and time to value.

Of note, Pharmaceuticals is emerging as a key growth vertical for Cognite, driven by strong organic traction from industry leaders. These organizations face challenges in asset management, maintenance strategies, and generative AI applications that demand seamless integration of complex operational and enterprise data ecosystems. These challenges align closely with our core verticals, enabling our existing offerings to deliver significant value and proving that focusing on our core continues to expand our addressable market, with new customer segments coming to us.

We ended 2024 with 29 new logos, with 56% of that new business coming from the Americas. We also expanded $23M ARR across regions and verticals, with 41% coming from industries outside of Oil & Gas.

These successes highlight how our proven go-to-market execution delivers transformative outcomes, expands our geographic and vertical footprint, and strengthens our customer base.

Rapid Product Development and Adoption

We executed quickly to meet market demand for industrial AI. We drove efficiencies in root cause analysis and other business-critical workflows with a gen AI-enhanced data exploration experience, expanded AI robotics use cases, and introduced advanced core data models to accelerate the adoption of AI across industry.

Only an idea six months ago, we made significant developments on Cognite Atlas AI™, our low-code Industrial Agent solution revolutionizing how industries approach AI-powered operations. We’ve made it easy for anyone to build and deploy hundreds of reliable AI agents within minutes, driving impact for our customers. Our Cognite Atlas AI™ co-innovation program is in high demand, creating a robust pipeline of over 35 opportunities for 2025.

At the same time, we continued to advance Cognite Data Fusion's core industrial data management capabilities. As I mentioned, Verdantix rated Cognite as a leader in its Industrial Data Management Solutions report, with a perfect score for our Data Modeling. We also received perfect scores across 'Indirect industrial data acquisition,' ‘Platform development environment, ' and ‘Platform APIs,’ and the highest score for 'unstructured data utilization’ of all data platforms reviewed. 

We achieved this by focusing on repeatability and scalability in our product development, allowing us to invest in core functionality that drives value for our customers. Through continued advancements to our data modeling, extractors, simulation integrations, natural language search, data and 3D exploration, and AI agent workflows, we have reduced the time it takes to onboard new customers by 50% and accelerated customer productivity by 75%.

This rapid product innovation accelerated greater adoption and value realization across our existing customers. Our Monthly Average Users grew 98% year over year, surpassing the goal we set for this year in our company targets.

In 2024, we saw our large, long-term customers grow adoption, one surpassing 5,000 MAU, roughly a 700% year-over-year growth. Still, we also saw new customers ramp up quickly, with one onboarded 60% of their planned users in just one month after rolling out Cognite Data Fusion® across seven sites. 

We’re also excited to see 22 third-party applications, each with over 100 MAU, thriving on top of Cognite Data Fusion’s robust data foundation. These include solutions from ISVs like Rockwell, custom applications developed by customers, and analytics tools through PowerBI, Grafana, and Jupyter Notebooks. This impressive 630% increase in third-party applications was created through data modeling and is yet another example of focusing on our core paying dividends.

Increased adoption means we are delivering customer value. This year, we identified over $1 billion in customer value we’ve delivered across operations productivity, asset reliability, and process optimization. For example, one customer took only one month to scale Cognite Data Fusion® across 11 sites and achieved a 15% increase in Process Efficiency, a 10% increase in Product Value, and a 10% reduction in Energy Consumption.

We are witnessing significant, measurable business value across our existing customer base, a driving force that continues to grow adoption—and inspire and define Cognite's culture.

World-Class Delivery

We believe in a business built on mutual success. Our experts work as an extension of our customers' teams, fostering long-term relationships and prioritizing sustainable value creation over short-term gains. This collaborative ethos is why customers consistently describe their relationship with Cognite as a partnership, not a transactional engagement. This commitment to owning customer value creation is deeply embedded in Cognite’s values.

A perfect example of our customer-first culture was on display at Impact 2024 in Houston. Over two days, we welcomed 323 guest attendees from 96 different companies and featured 64 customer speakers. These sessions were dedicated to sharing best practices and showcasing the real value our customers achieve with Cognite’s products and people. The camaraderie was palpable—a clear reflection of joint dedication to success.

With AI at the core of most of our customer conversations more than ever, Cognite continues to be a trusted advisor to our customers, helping them navigate their transformation. We have solidified ourselves as the experts in industrial AI and data solutions. We have earned the right to operate across diverse verticals, partners, and use cases. In 2025, we will build on our open, trusted, cross-domain expertise by expanding our ecosystem to provide tailored solutions and domain-specific knowledge wherever needed.

2024 saw incredible progress across our partners, with over 30% of our ARR coming from the partner ecosystem.

We launched Cognite Embedded to empower OEMs and ISVs to accelerate product development by 2-3x and reduce total cost of ownership by up to 80%. System integrator partnerships with firms like Radix have generated millions in new pipeline opportunities. And we reinforced our position as a cloud-agnostic leader in industrial data and AI solutions in 2024. 

We were recognized as Microsoft’s Energy and Resources Partner of the Year, showcasing our ability to drive transformative results for customers. With AWS, we entered a strategic collaboration agreement to deliver an enterprise digital twin platform and contextualized industrial data foundation–a reference point for industrial data fabric design– unlocking a potential $30M+ business impact for customers. Additionally, Cognite Data Fusion® is now available on Google Cloud in Saudi Arabia. 

These partnerships highlight our solutions' differentiated value, customer demand, scalability, flexibility, and how we can deliver value across our diverse, expanding ecosystem.

Beyond our external ecosystem, we made strategic organizational investments to drive world-class customer success and position ourselves for continued growth in 2025 and beyond.

We strengthened our leadership team with key hires, including appointing Geir Engdahl as Chief Product Officer to drive innovation, Guru Ananthanarayanan as Managing Director of Cognite India to expand our capability to deliver, and Bill Hendricks as President of Cognite Americas to accelerate growth in this region.

We also made impactful operational changes, including relocating our headquarters to Phoenix to better align with market opportunities and moving our domicile to the Netherlands to support our global expansion. Furthermore, we committed to significant growth investments, with 168 new Cogniters hired globally and nearly another 100 open positions as we start the new year, reinforcing our capacity to scale rapidly and meet growing customer demand.

As we close, let’s return to where we began: the industrial landscape is shifting, and the market is meeting us exactly where our strengths lie.

Cognite placed early and bold bets on mastering complex industrial data, navigating both conventional and hybrid AI, and pioneering the adoption of generative AI for risk-averse industrial operations. This has undeniably paid off.

Our competitive edge is clear:

• Cognite is uniquely positioned to lead the new, AI-driven transformation, anchored by our unmatched expertise in unstructured and semi-structured data, advanced data modeling, and industrial AI.
• A focused, repeatable go-to-market execution delivers predictable value across the customer journey.
• Unmatched data contextualization and data management capabilities power a real-time industrial knowledge graph—essential for trustworthy, hallucination-free AI—reinforcing our market leadership, while Cognite Atlas AI™ accelerates industrial AI solutions through customer co-innovation.
• A customer-centric, collaborative approach and open partner ecosystem deliver value and ensure lasting success for our customers and Cognite.

We are well-positioned to lead as market dynamics shift toward holistic, cloud-wide solutions over siloed platforms. Customers increasingly demand high-ROI AI solutions for operational and enterprise-wide unstructured data—areas where we excel. Our deep specialization and generative AI innovation position Cognite as the go-to partner for CDOs and industrial leaders seeking transformative, scalable solutions.

By staying true to our core data modeling capabilities and advancing AI innovation, we are ready to help customers unlock unparalleled value and redefine industrial operations in 2025 and beyond.

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