Accenture bolsters industrial AI services with Flutura acquisition

Professional services giant Accenture has announced the acquisition of Flutura, an industrial artificial intelligence (AI) company based in Bangalore, India.

The acquisition strengthens Accenture’s own industrial AI services, as it looks to boost the performance of plants, refineries, and supply chains, as well as help clients hit their net zero goals faster.

In an announcement, Accenture said it plans to bring Flutura’s capabilities to its global clients in the energy, chemicals, mining, and pharmaceutical industries. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

“Flutura democratises AI for engineers, enabling manufacturing and other asset-intensive companies with the carbon intelligence to reduce emissions, energy consumption and lost output due to unplanned downtime of industrial assets,” explained Senthil Ramani, senior managing director and applied intelligence lead for growth markets at Accenture

“This acquisition will power industrial AI-led transformation for our clients globally and particularly in Australia, South-East Asia, Japan, Africa, India, Latin America and the Middle East.”

Flutura specialises in industrial data science services for manufacturers and other asset-intensive companies, with an AI platform that serves up self-service solutions for advanced analytics.

The company has a staff base of around 110 professionals based across offices in India, the US, Singapore, and the Netherlands.

Industrial engineers and data scientists can develop digital models of industrial assets on Flutura’s AI platform, which is specially designed to processes data from disparate IT and operations technology systems.

The acquisition is the latest in a string of related buys for Accenture in recent times. Last year, it acquired Japanese data science company ALBERT, having previously snapped up a host of companies around the world to strengthen its data services.

Those included Australia’s Analytics8; France-based Sentelis; India’s Bridgei2i and Byte Prophecy; Pragsis Bidoop in Spain; as well as UK data consultancy Mudano.

The firm also acquired US data companies Clarity Insights, End-to-End Analytics, and Core Compete.

With its latest addition, Accenture said it is continuing its aim of helping businesses build a strong core of AI capabilities at a time when many are not very AI mature.

For Flutura, company CEO Krishnan Raman said that the takeover will enable the business to further grow its AI platform with Accenture’s resources.

“Our AI platform enables engineers to respond with agility to ever-changing market and operating conditions,” he said. “We look forward to scaling this as part of Accenture and helping more industrial clients achieve high-value outcomes in their production operations.”