Palo Alto-based Bolo AI, a company providing artificial intelligence tools for people powering heavy industry, today announced it raised $8.1 million in a seed round to build what the company calls a “system of action” to unlock knowledge for teams to act quickly, safely and manage operational value chains.

The company was founded by Chief Executive Diti Sood (pictured, right) and Chief Technology Officer Dr. Lalit Jain (left).

Sood’s career began as a field engineer in the proverbial trenches as an oil and gas field engineer for Schlumberger NV, also known as SLB, a global national oilfield services company. There she learned a lot about the industry’s everyday challenges of workers in Abu Dhabi as the first female engineer in her peer group to join offshore rig operations.

She took that knowledge with her when she moved to the United States to earn her master of business administration at Harvard and pivoted to AI and tech, where she focused on the intersection between heavy industry and AI.

“I founded Bolo AI with a mission, which is very close to my heart: to make daily work faster, safer and better for the heavy industry worker,” Sood told SiliconANGLE in an exclusive interview. “I recognize that I have this privilege and this rare background that combines my field experience and tech background, which gives me an unfair advantage to build this new operating system for the industry.”

Everything on job sites generates data: production data, sensor data, Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition information used to monitor and control industrial processes, documentation and management procedures. According to Sood, although much of this is extremely well-recorded and -orchestrated by enterprise giants such as SAP SE, Oracle Corp. and IBM Corp., it remains fragmented and difficult to access by frontline workers and managers.

“Right now, there are a lot of broken and siloed systems, which leads to missed opportunities,” said Sood. “For example, a delay in a project might be buried in an 80-page weekly report. As a project manager, you might miss that small detail and now the project is delayed. I feel there’s an immense opportunity to minimize this waste.”

Bolo AI’s vision is to become the single pane of glass for industrial workers, a daily-use platform tightly integrated with systems such as Microsoft Teams and adaptable across devices, including desktops, tablets and phones. The software tailors AI-powered insights depending on who is using it and their specific workflows.

For instance, a drilling operator might receive real-time insights about well logs and drilling hazards, while project managers would see schedule data and financial trends that flag cost overruns and delays.

One of Bolo AI’s early applications focuses on helping project managers prevent capital project overruns, an urgent issue given that industrial projects can exceed budgets by up to 79% and timelines by six months to two years. The platform can pull context from disparate sources such as contracts, change orders and meeting notes to alert managers before problems escalate.

True Ventures led the round, with participation from Benchstrength, Accomplice, J Ventures and Beat Ventures.

Sood said with the new funding the company wants to invest in research and development, especially the engineering team to build deeper integrations with existing legacy enterprise systems and grow the marketing team slowly.

Photo: Bolo AI