Founders: Geir Engdahl, John Markus Lervik, Stein Danielsen
CEO: Girish Rishi
Launched: 2017
Headquarters: Phoenix, Arizona
Funding: $300 million
Valuation: $1.6 billion
Key Technologies: Artificial intelligence, cloud computing, explainable AI, machine learning, digital twins, low code/no code software, Internet of Things
Industry: Enterprise technology
Previous appearances on Disruptor 50 list: 0
Cognite prides itself on making AI work in the real world and has made a move to be at the center of action in places as far afield as the oil well and factory shop floor.
The company's fiscal year 2025 proved a record breaker. Revenue exceeded $170 million, while posting a 36% increase in annual recurring revenue.
Over the past year, Cognite has been working with industries to speed up the adoption of task-specific or agentic AI to automate complex processes with more data insights, including with its 2025 release of Atlas AI, a production-ready AI agent to help businesses move from experimentation to implementation of solutions faster. In a surge of adoption, Atlas AI is now used by well more than half of customers and 70 percent of new bookings in 2025, according to the company, while the number of monthly active users climbed by 26 percent.
Girish Rishi, who was named CEO in 2022, has been spearheading the changes after co-founder John Markus Lervik stepped aside to become chief strategy and development officer. Rishi brings in U.S. experience as former CEO of Panasonic-acquired supply chain software company Blue Yonder and executive leadership positions at Motorola and Tyco.
Cognite was formed in 2016 in Oslo as a strategic partner with European oil company Aker BP, which became an investor and a major customer. The company was co-founded by Norwegian serial entrepreneur Lervik with CTO Geir Engdahl, a former Google software engineer. They set out to transform heavy-asset industries with improved digital data analysis, concentrating on industrial businesses in oil and gas, energy and manufacturing.
An independently run affiliate of Aker ASA, the investment firm of Norwegian billionaire Kjell Inge Roekke, Cognite counts oil giant Saudi Aramco among its shareholders, as well as private equity firms Accel and Technology Crossover Ventures. In 2022, Aramco bought a 7.4 percent stake from Aker BP.
Over the past 12 months, Cognite sealed several strategic partnerships in industrial AI applications: one with fellow Disruptor company Databricks for a domain-specific intelligent data foundation; an alliance with Databricks' rival Snowflake to streamline access to data across the enterprise; and a deal with French energy company TotalEnergies to improve the accuracy and speed of its drilling and production facilities. In the physical AI world, Cognite also partnered with AI manufacturing specialist Tulip for improvements on the shop floor such as reducing defects.
While oil and gas remains a core customer strength, Cognite says approximately 40% of 2025 revenue came from customers outside the sector.
The company's headquarters was recently relocated from Oslo, Norway, to Tempe, Arizona, to be central to the state's high-tech industries and semiconductor manufacturing hub. Positioning itself for a boom in industrial AI forecast by IoT Analytics to hit $153.9 billion by 2030, Cognite has been hiring for new jobs in the Phoenix area and also expanded with a new post in Abu Dhabi. Headcount grew by 21% in 2025.
Looking to the future, the major industrial AI SaaS player says it maintains a "moonshot" goal of delivering a cumulative $100 billion in business value to its industrial customers by 2035.
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