Novity announces strategic investment from Acario Innovation

The investment supports Novity’s expansion of its TruPrognostics platform, a hybrid AI and physics-based software solution that was spun out of Xerox PARC, the storied Silicon Valley R&D lab. Novity’s technology provides unmatched accuracy in early detection of faults in industrial equipment, with actionable leads times for any form of machinery, from compressors, to pumps, fans, induction motors, and beyond. Natural gas operations rely heavily on high-availability assets in this class, many of which operate 24/7. If any of this equipment suffers from unplanned downtime or failures, it creates substantial safety risk to personnel and disrupts supply, leading to significant lost revenue and higher operating costs. Downtime losses for only the processing and compression assets responsible for increasing natural gas pressure prior to pipeline transportation can easily exceed US$500 000/h. Applying Novity’s AI in this category alone has demonstrated significant improvements to reliability, safety and maintenance efficiency for Fortune 500 operators in avoiding these issues with accurate early detection. While Tokyo Gas downstream customers are mainly located in Japan, the company has steadily expanded its upstream operations globally, with a significant presence in the US. Through its Tokyo Gas Natural Resources subsidiary (TGNR), the company is consistently one of the largest producers in the Haynesville Shale, following the Chevron JV in 2025 and the Rockcliff Energy acquisition announced in 2022 and integrated thereafter.

With the unprecedented growth in power demand for AI data centres, reliabil-ity has become a major concern further downstream from natural gas supply. Operators are prioritising speed to power, which has created a surge in behind-the-meter (BTM) power projects. Nearly 20 GW in BTM power generation was announced in ERCOT alone in 2025 (35% of nationwide), with another 10 GW through April of 2026. The majority of these assets are gas-fired turbines, which require a high level of reliability to ensure the on-site power is dispatchable. Novity is well positioned to provide stability and uptime in this asset class and the associated hybrid configurations that utilise battery storage.

“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.”

“Improving reliability and operational efficiency across a diverse asset base is one of our core priorities,” added 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. We believe Novity is a powerful solution to address maintenance challenges in this regard, with the po-tential to support a wide range of industrial customers operating equipment in both field and factory environments.”

Novity’s goal is to enable all process industries to finally transition away from fixed maintenance schedules - starting with oil and gas infrastructure. To accomplish this, Novity’s platform uses a proprietary combination of physics-based models, machine learning, and AI, to detect early signals of developing equipment issues, translate them into actionable insights for reliability and maintenance teams, and avoid unplanned downtime events.

While the industry has previously attempted to solve these problems with wireless single sensors, the approach effectively limits operators to condition monitoring. By contrast, Novity is sensor agnostic and combines multiple types of data from multiple types of sensors, from acoustic emissions, temperature, mass, current, cavitation, open and close times for values and much more. Novity processes this data in its algorithms to drive actionable maintenance plans for operators by predicting specific dates for equipment failures that are updated dynamically in real time, with 90% or higher detection accuracy rates routinely ob-served in production.

Acario’s investment follows previous investment from Myriad Ventures, WERU Investment, Japan’s first university originated independent asset management company, and Metawater, a water and environmental engineering company that was formed as a joint venture of Fuji Electric and NGK Insulators.

Read the article online at: https://www.lngindustry.com/liquid-natural-gas/25052026/novity-announces-strategic-investment-from-acario-innovation/