Burnaby startup acquired by GE Digital in a $153-million deal

Founders of Bit Stew Systems, a company started in Silicon Valley, moved to Burnaby in 2007 to capitalize on their first major customer, BCHydro

A startup that moved from Silicon Valley to Burnaby and helped BC Hydro establish its network of smart metres has been acquired by GE Digital in a US$153-million deal.

Bit Stew Systems co-founder and CEO Kevin Collins called the deal “a positive exit.” The company, which provides data analysis and predictive automation for connected devices used by industrial customers in the utilities, manufacturing, aviation and oil and gas industries, has been working with GE Digital for about a year and a half in the area known as Industrial Internet of Things.

“The acquisition is really giving us an opportunity to showcase our technology in a much bigger market and have the leverage that GE has,” he said, explaining that GE wants to build a “centre of excellence” in Vancouver. “They want the team, they want the technology, they want to collaborate with us and they want Bit Stew to be a catalyst for culture change within the company. Because we’ve got that startup flavour.”

GE has developed an industrial cloud-based platform called Predix, and has been using Bit Stew’s technology to integrate and analyze data. “Our technology is great at integrating very complex data from the industrial environment,” said Collins. “Instead of humans doing it, we have artificial intelligence and machine learning that automates that entire process. So it takes minutes, a process that would take months if not years to do manually.”

In 2002 Collins was working as a CTO of a Silicon Valley startup, where he met software engineer Alex Clark. A few years later they started their own company, which eventually became Bit Stew, and in 2007 Collins convinced Clark to move to Vancouver. One of the reasons for their move was to capitalize on their first major customer, BC Hydro. Bit Stew’s technology helped BC Hydro to set up a network of almost 2 million smart metres and analyze the data that is regularly communicated from those metres.

Relocating to Burnaby, says Collins, was a positive move for the company because of the universities and BCIT, which are turning out skilled grads with specialized skills required in the industry. “Part of the attraction to Vancouver is that you’ve got a lot of talent and it’s sticky talent,” he said. “The Vancouver culture is to work as a team, remain with a company, and build a career. If you can retain the talent, there’s always going to be an influx of investment and companies coming in to Vancouver.”