Billion Dollar Unicorns: In Uptake, Groupon Founder Shows He Has Learnt His Lesson

Photo Credit: Tony Webster/Flickr.com

A recent Zion Market Research report estimates the global predictive analytics market to be worth $10.95 billion by the year 2022, growing at 21% annually over the next five-year-period from $3.49 billion in 2016. There aren’t many companies from the Midwest that have made it to the Billion Dollar Unicorn club. Chicago’s Uptake is one such rare company that has fast tracked its way into the club.

Uptake’s Offerings

Groupon’s co-founder Brad Keywell and his investment partner Eric Lefkofsky joined hands to set up Uptake in 2014. Uptake’s solutions perform Big Data analysis at the industrial level. Its platform helps customers gather data from various IT systems and sensors in factories or on equipment and uses analytic tools to build computer models that can forecast upcoming needs. Organizations can use the data from the solution to optimize performance, reduce asset failures, and enhance safety. The platform makes nearly 50,000 predictions an hour.

Uptake has entered into tie-ups with heavy equipment companies like Caterpillar to utilize data collected from their machinery and integrate it with data from operations and other third party sources. The integration has led to a repository of meaningful information that is actionable and can allow the right people to take right actions at the right time. The solution helps companies like Caterpillar deploy machines that are more suited to the task at hand, secure better hours, improved efficiency, and better life expectancy for heavy machines.

Uptake may have started out within the construction sector, but it has since expanded into mining, rail, aviation, and retail. More recently, as part of its Energy segment, it has ventured into Wind energy. Uptake Wind allows engineers and wind energy operators to identify high-priority problems that could impact downtime and help them address these issues in time. Its software can detect and resolve under-performance issues, and give machine learning recommendations to improve production. The wind-focused solution helps in reducing non-technical loss in transmission and distribution, predicting equipment failure for generation, and improve the customer experience by offering integrated distributed energy resources. The service has already signed up Berkshire Hathaway Energy as its client.