Capital venture funding flows into digital twin technologies

Sharper Shape Group Inc., which provides powerline inspection solutions for the utility industry, and Akselos, which is involved in physics-based digital twin technology, have announced the successful closing of their respective funding rounds.

Sharper Shape completed an $18 million Series B round on May 11, 2022, with participation from the Michael Harvey Trust as lead investor.

Two days prior to the announcement from Sharper Shape, Akselos announced a $16.5 million funding round, with participation from AT Capital Group, Future Energy Ventures, Japan Energy Fund and Shell Ventures.

Sharper Shape

The investment will support Sharper Shape’s ambition to enhance its Shaper CORE Living Digital Twin (LDT) offering, aiming to deliver improved safety, efficiency, accuracy and operational cost saving to utilities. This is hoped to be done through enhanced digital inspection workflow decision making and management.

The funding will go toward advancing the technological development of the solution to further the capabilities of the platform as well as to enable additional deployments across the United States and Europe.

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The LDT technology incorporates real-time updates and asset change detection into a traditional 3D digital twin model, integrating aerial, ground and third-party asset data into a single, powerful artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) driven software platform.

In practice, this means that as the surrounding environment and the utilities’ assets change, the LDT is updated to provide transparency and allow collaboration between distributed and centralised teams. This in turn will allow them to evaluate network risks, identify potential issues, and prioritise vegetation maintenance and other actions to meet operational and regulatory requirements.

Akselos

With this investment round, Akselos will acquire an investor base, enabling it to scale both its team and solutions to optimise the energy industry’s infrastructure and accelerate large scale deployment of renewable energy.

This is a crucial step toward the company’s aim of providing technology to enable the energy transition in line with Akselos’ commitment to the IEA Net Zero 2050 roadmap.

Akselos’ solution – which is reportedly 1,000x faster and 10x more accurate than the industry standard when modelling large scale assets – simulates virtual replicas, or predictive and accurate digital twins, of energy assets, such as offshore wind turbine and their foundations.

This news comes in as the market value for digital twin solutions for smart cities is projected to reach $4.8 billion by 2027.

This is according to Digital Twins Market by Technology, Twinning Type, Cyber-to-Physical Solutions, Use Cases and Applications in Industry Verticals 2022 – 2027, a research report released by Research and Markets.