Announcing our Investment in SensorUp
We are proud to announce our investment in SensorUp, a Calgary-based company building the agentic operations platform for heavy industry. SensorUp is the AI-enablement layer that turns fragmented field data, sensor streams, and engineering records into structured, auditable, agent-ready workflows, giving industrial operators and their AI systems the context they need to act with confidence.
Pender Ventures is leading the financing, with participation from Climate Investment, Evok Innovations, and Occidental, a strategic investor and client.
The Sensor Context Problem
At Pender Ventures, we spend a lot of time thinking about context – specifically, what makes data usable for the humans and AI systems that need to act on it. Heavy industrial operations are one of the most demanding environments for this problem.
Heavy industrial operators have spent the last decade layering on new sensors and data sources, each generating readings at different resolutions, in varied formats, and at different intervals. The result is a flood of conflicting alerts that cannot be reconciled, anomalies that cannot be traced to a specific asset or cause, and compliance obligations still managed through spreadsheets and manual narratives. There is a lot of data, but very limited ability to use it productively to improve workflows and outcomes.
Introducing SensorUp
SensorUp was founded to solve this problem at its root. Dr. Steve Liang, the company’s founder and Chief Science Officer, is a Professor at the University of Calgary and one of the world’s foremost authorities on industrial data standards and the Internet of Things. He spent over twelve years building the formal ontology that underpins SensorUp’s platform.
The result is not simply software. It is a structured model that takes data from any source, any hardware, and any measurement type, and reconciles it into a single, traceable representation of physical-world events. Every reading is anchored to a specific asset, location, and timestamp, with an auditable relationship to every other signal in the system.
The engineering team is built around Dr. Liang’s former PhD students, which means the people who understand this architecture most deeply are the ones building it. This is the kind of technical foundation that cannot be reverse-engineered or fast-followed, and it is precisely what makes SensorUp a natural platform for industrial AI: the structured, high-quality ground truth that AI agents require to be reliable, explainable, and trusted in the field.
Today, SensorUp is in production with five Oil and Gas Climate Initiative (OGCI) member companies and a growing roster of regional operators, deployed in oil and gas, the world’s most demanding industrial data environment.
Operators use the platform to triage flare and vent events against regulatory thresholds, coordinate turnaround readiness across thousands of components, detect and resolve methane leaks, and assemble emissions inventories that withstand regulator and capital-markets scrutiny, all from a single deterministic asset model rather than five disconnected tools.
What is changing rapidly is how that work gets done: customers are using SensorUp as the trusted foundation for agentic workflows that can act on the world as it is, not as it was reported. Oil and gas is the proving ground. The platform was built for every industrial vertical that follows: power generation, utilities, mining, and chemicals; wherever distributed assets, multimodal data, and regulated operations meet.
Why We Invested
We back teams first. SensorUp has two of the most credible people we have encountered in industrial technology, and together they cover the full stack of what it takes to win in this market.
Dr. Steve Liang brings the scientific credibility that makes the platform defensible. As co-chair of the OGC SensorThings API international standard and a leading academic voice on IoT and industrial data, he is not just building on existing knowledge; he helped create it.
CEO Terry Cunningham is one of the most accomplished operators in enterprise software. His career spans over 30 years and more than a dozen companies — founding Crystal Decisions (acquired by Seagate), senior leadership at Seagate Software, VERITAS, and EVault, and CEO roles at Springpath, Guavus, Coral8, Comprehend Systems, and Descartes Labs. He understands how enterprise technology earns adoption at scale and how to translate technical differentiation into commercial momentum. When Terry walks into Occidental, ConocoPhillips, or Total, he is not pitching — he is a peer. That matters enormously in an industry where trust is earned slowly and lost quickly.
What is equally compelling is the team he has built around him. Julia Hole (CFO) brings a Deloitte and PwC foundation, seven years in finance leadership at TuneIn, including acting CFO, and a track record managing budgets exceeding $130M. She is an exceptional fit for a company at this stage of capital discipline and investor scrutiny. Katherine Densmore (CRO) is a former ExxonMobil mechanical engineer who has worked across field operations, R&D, and commercial functions, a profile that is rare in a revenue leadership role and one that opens doors with technical buyers inside the very operators SensorUp is targeting. Spencer Cox (CTO) brings 20 years of experience building complex data-driven cloud applications directly with enterprise customers, and is already designing the architecture for an AI-native engineering org. Kayla Ball (CPO) comes with 15+ years in energy tech and SaaS, recruited directly from competitor Validere. This is not a first-time team learning on the job. It is an experienced bench assembled deliberately by a CEO who treats team construction as a core competency.
The technology moat is real and hard-won. The sensor ontology is reusable across every customer and vertical the company enters. Each new deployment makes the next one more efficient and extends the reach of the ontology itself, creating a compounding advantage that strengthens with scale. Adding a new use case is configuration, not a new product build, a structural advantage that generalist competitors cannot replicate without starting over.
We were drawn to this opportunity because the timing is right. Three forces are converging: regulatory pressure on methane and emissions reporting is intensifying globally; industrial operators are actively investing in AI-driven decision-making, and the bottleneck is not the models, it is the structured, trustworthy data those models require; and the agentic AI wave is arriving faster than most enterprise software companies are prepared for. SensorUp is already in production with the operators who will capture that value first. The platform is being pulled into agentic workloads not because SensorUp is pitching AI, but because their data foundation is the only one in the market that can support it reliably.
This near-term thesis also points toward something larger. SensorUp is not just solving a data quality problem, it is building the operational intelligence layer that makes industrial AI possible. The same ontology that structures sensor data for human review today is the foundation for what researchers call world modelling: giving AI a complete, accurate, real-time picture of physical reality. When that becomes possible, AI stops being a reasoning tool fed information by humans and starts being a system that can act directly on the world as it is. SensorUp is building the underlayer for that future, and the operators already running on the platform will be first in line to capture that value. We are thrilled to help support them.
Looking Ahead
We are excited to partner with SensorUp as they expand their customer base and advance toward the multi-vertical platform this technology was designed to become. If you work in industrial operations, data infrastructure, or adjacent fields and see an opportunity for collaboration, we would be glad to hear from you.
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