St. Louis, MO – On Thursday, July 27th, Ameren announced that innovative industrial analytics provider, Mingo, would be one of their latest additions to the Ameren Accelerator program — an initiative that pools money and resources to help promising new companies develop and market tech products.
Ameren reported that more than 200 companies from 31 countries and 23 states applied for the program. The startups chosen from the global applicant pool will be granted $100,000 in seed capital and, for the next 12 weeks, will have access to representatives from Ameren, UMSL, and Capital Innovators. Ultimately, only 7 start-ups were chosen.
Warner Baxter, Ameren president and CEO, said he believes companies like Mingo can benefit Ameren’s customer base. “Clearly there’s a possibility for every company to provide something of value to our customers,” Baxter said. Mingo is the only technology company admitted to the program that specifically focuses on industrial data analytics.
This announcement comes on the heels of an unprecedented string of successes for the innovative manufacturing analytics provider. Mingo launched the beta version of their analytics application last summer, was awarded an Arch Grant in the fall of 2016, and — according to company founder and CEO, Bryan Sapot, — already acquired several paying customers. Most recently, Mingo was featured in a popular industry case study that featured one of their customers, Versatech, who used the Mingo manufacturing analytics application to increase OEE (Overall Equipment Effectiveness) by 30% and drive a significant reduction in overtime work.
I am a little overwhelmed by the amount of validation our product has received in the past 365 days,” said Sapot. We are hyper-focused on helping our customers leverage their existing data in a simple, easy-to-use manner. It’s something that I think has been too complicated in the past. In my experience, stakeholders inside the business eally just want actionable data without any of the added complexity or unnecessary costs. That was the motivation for creating our product, and I think we have a hit,” Sapot shared.
Mingo will showcase their continued progress to potential investors at a “Demo Day” set for October. In March, Ameren had left open the possibility that it may invest in some of the technologies or businesses that emerge from the program. “We planned to expand into energy businesses about 2 years from now, but this was an opportunity to apply our technology to the energy space now, and access industry experts that would be much harder – if not impossible – to reach if we were not part of this program”, Sapot continued.
“Being included in the Ameren Accelerator Program is a great opportunity for us to learn, grow, and continue our progress,” Sapot said. “As our solution grows in popularity, I think it’s critical we grow our business the right way and continue to focus on providing our customers with actionable data in accessible formats.”
Mingo is an industrial analytics technology company. Mingo created their flagship application to collect all actionable data from the manufacturing shop floor and bring it instantly into dashboards that display it in ways that non-technical people can use and understand.
Ameren Corporation is an American power company created December 31, 1997, by the merger of St. Louis, Missouri’s Union Electric Company and the neighboring Central Illinois Public Service Company of Springfield, Illinois.