Novity secures investment from Tokyo Gas venture arm

Novity has received a strategic investment from Acario Innovation, the corporate venture capital arm of Tokyo Gas.

The San Francisco-based company develops predictive maintenance software for process industries. Its TruPrognostics platform combines artificial intelligence, machine learning and physics-based models to detect early signs of equipment faults and estimate remaining useful life.

Tokyo Gas is Japan’s largest city gas utility and also operates in LNG, natural gas, electricity and energy solutions. The company serves more than 13 million customer accounts.

The investment will support Novity’s expansion in industrial and energy applications.

Focus on critical energy equipment

Novity’s technology is aimed at machinery such as compressors, pumps, fans and induction motors. These assets are widely used in natural gas production, processing and transport, where unplanned downtime can create safety risks, disrupt supply and increase operating costs.

According to the company, downtime losses for processing and compression assets used to increase natural gas pressure before pipeline transportation can exceed 500,000 dollars per hour.

Tokyo Gas has expanded its upstream operations outside Japan. Through Tokyo Gas Natural Resources, the company has a significant presence in the United States, including operations in the Haynesville Shale.

“This investment reflects a shared conviction that AI-based predictive maintenance is now a foundational capability for critical energy infrastructure through the supply chain,” said Markus Larsson, Co-Founder and CEO at Novity.

“We’re aligned on evaluating high-impact equipment use cases — starting with compression — where earlier detection and Remaining Useful Life Prognostics materially improves uptime and operational performance.”

Data center growth increases reliability demands

Novity also points to the growth of AI data centers as a driver of new reliability requirements in energy infrastructure.

As power demand rises, operators are increasingly developing behind-the-meter power generation projects. According to the company, nearly 20 gigawatts of behind-the-meter power generation was announced in the ERCOT market alone in 2025, with another 10 gigawatts announced through April 2026.

Many of these projects rely on gas-fired turbines. Novity says this creates demand for predictive maintenance in turbine assets and hybrid configurations that also use battery storage.

From alerts to maintenance planning

Acario says the investment reflects the need for more precise maintenance tools in industrial operations.

“Improving reliability and operational efficiency across a diverse asset base is one of our core priorities,” said Kenji Maeda, CEO at Acario.

“Predictive maintenance has historically been difficult to achieve, but we believe that with Novity’s hybrid AI solution, plant managers don’t just get anomaly alerts and alarms, but instead an actionable fault diagnosis and a precise failure timeline, often providing the ability to act months before issues arise.”

Novity’s platform is designed to help process industries move away from fixed maintenance schedules. The company says its software uses existing operational data and combines information from different sensor types, including acoustic emissions, temperature, current, cavitation, mass flow and valve opening and closing times.

Unlike systems based on single wireless sensors, Novity says its approach is sensor-agnostic and can combine multiple data sources. The company says detection accuracy rates of 90 percent or higher are routinely observed in production environments.

Previous investors include Myriad Ventures and Metawater

Acario’s investment follows earlier investments from Myriad Ventures, WERU Investment and Metawater.

WERU Investment is described as Japan’s first university-originated independent asset management company. Metawater is a water and environmental engineering company formed as a joint venture of Fuji Electric and NGK Insulators.

Novity says its deployments include upstream and midstream oil and gas, LNG terminals and wastewater operations.