What justifies Schneider Electric’s premium valuation of Cognite?

Schneider Electric has strengthened industrial software portfolio with the acquisition of Cognite, adding AI-powered analytics and agentic AI capabilities.

Schneider Electric has announced an agreement to acquire industrial AI software company Cognite in an all-cash transaction valued at US$3.1 billion. Once completed, Cognite will be integrated into AVEVA, Schneider Electric’s industrial software business, strengthening its CONNECT industrial intelligence platform.

Founded less than ten years ago, Cognite has rapidly established itself as one of the leading providers of industrial data and AI platforms. Its cloud-native technology contextualizes engineering, operational, and enterprise data through a unified data model and knowledge graph, enabling AI-powered analytics and agentic AI across industrial operations. The acquisition combines these capabilities with Schneider Electric’s automation, energy management, and industrial software portfolio.

The strategic importance of these capabilities is reflected in the valuation. Based on Cognite’s reported 2025 revenue of more than US$170 million, the acquisition implies an enterprise value to revenue multiple of approximately 18.2x, making it one of the highest valuations ever paid in the industrial software sector. For comparison, Siemens acquired Mentor Graphics at 3.8x revenue, Aveva acquired OSIsoft at 8.8x, and Siemens acquired Altair at 14.1x revenue. While these transactions involved highly strategic industrial software businesses spanning electronic design automation, low-code application development, industrial historians, and engineering simulation, none were pure industrial DataOps and AI platform providers. Cognite’s premium valuation therefore reflects not only its growth prospects, but also the increasing strategic importance of owning the industrial data layer that enables AI applications across heterogeneous automation environments.

The next battleground is the industrial data layer

A $3.1 billion acquisition for a company that generated approximately $170 million in revenue in 2025 reflects the strategic value of owning the industrial data layer rather than simply acquiring another software application. Industrial software is increasingly evolving from a hierarchical ISA-95 architecture toward a more connected, data-centric model.

Rather than relying on point-to-point integrations between control systems, operations software and enterprise applications, manufacturers are increasingly deploying industrial data platforms that ingest, contextualize and expose data across the entire software stack. This unified data layer enables analytics applications (including AI applications) to access consistent, real-time operational data while decoupling applications from underlying control systems (illustrated below). As a result, ownership of the industrial data platform has become one of the most strategically valuable positions in the industrial software stack.

However, this growing strategic role also places greater importance on the perceived neutrality of the underlying data platform. Cognite has built its reputation as an open platform capable of connecting data from virtually any industrial environment. As part of Schneider Electric and AVEVA, customers may increasingly question how neutral the platform will remain. While the technology might stay open, customer perception could become just as important.

Final thought: This raises competitive pressure on the rest of the market

The Cognite acquisition also increases competitive pressure on the rest of the industrial software market. Schneider Electric now combines automation hardware, energy management, AVEVA, the CONNECT platform, Cognite Data Fusion, knowledge graph technology, and industrial AI within a single ecosystem. This arguably makes it one of the industry’s most comprehensive Industrial AI platforms. As a result, competitors including Siemens, Rockwell Automation, Honeywell, and Emerson are likely to accelerate investments in industrial AI, data platforms and strategic acquisitions. The race is no longer simply about offering the best software suite, it’s about building the most complete industrial intelligence platform for the AI era.