Enterprises with a lot of physical infrastructure, such as wireless carriers and utilities, have large field service teams that perform maintenance work year-round to keep things keep humming along smoothly. Zinier Inc. believes that it can make those field service teams more productive using artificial intelligence.

The San Francisco startup this morning announced that it has clinched a $90 million funding round led by Iconiq Capital. Other participants included Accel, Founders Fund, Qualcomm Ventures, Tiger Global Management, NGP Capital and Newfund Capital. 

Zinier has built a software platform called ISAC that enables enterprises to provide central coordination of their field service teams. ISAC provides features for handling core tasks such as scheduling repairs and dispatching technicians, plus an AI-powered automation layer that optimizes the flow of work. 

The platform suggests specific actions that field service teams can take to become more efficient. If a technician dispatched to inspect a cell tower is running late due to traffic, ISAC will detect the delay, identify another engineer nearby who’s available to take over and send the shift supervisor a recommendation to reassign the task. When a team is drafting the work order for a repair job, ISAC can determine what spare parts they should take with them based on maintenance logs from previous assignments.

Zinier gives companies the option to crack open the lid and customize the underlying AI algorithms for their specific needs. An enterprise may train the neural networks using its own sample data to improve result accuracy, as well as tweak the variables that the platform considers when making recommendations for a given situation. A carrier, for instance, could configure ISAC to take weather into account when generating suggestions pertaining to maintenance times.

“Services that we rely on everyday — electricity, transportation, communication — are getting by on centuries-old infrastructure that requires a major upgrade for the next generation of users,” said Zinier co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Arka Dhar, co-founder and chief executive. “A field service workforce powered by both people and automation is necessary to execute the massive amount of work required.”

The enterprise technology market’s leading players seem to agree. Salesforce.com Inc. in August shelled out $1.35 billion to acquire ClickSoftware Technologies Ltd., a provider of field service management tools, while SAP SE made a similar bet with its purchase of Coresystems a year earlier.

The new $90 million cash injection should put Zinier in a stronger position to compete with its bigger rivals. The startup plans to grow its presence in the Asia Pacific region and establish partnerships with more system integrators, as well as step up product development efforts. 

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