Maana co-founders Donald Thompson and Babur Ozden. (Photo via Maana)

Some of the world’s top global investors continue to bet big on Maana.

The company today announced a $28 million Series C round led by China International Capital Corporation, a top China-based investment bank, and Eight Square Capital, another investor with Chinese roots. Previous backers like Intel Capital; GE Ventures; Chevron Technology Ventures; Saudi Aramco Energy Ventures; and Shell Technology Ventures participated. Total funding in Maana is now $68 million.

Despite its relatively small size — 100 employees, including 75 at its Bellevue, Wash. office — Maana has attracted top investors across a variety of sectors, and in particular energy. Founded in 2012, Maana helps large companies in industries like oil and gas, manufacturing, healthcare, and insurance extract knowledge from their employees and internal data, ultimately providing a recommendation engine that aims to optimize workflows.

“Maana enables companies to create models at scale by encoding the expertise of their employees and combining that with data from silos,” Babur Ozden, CEO of Maana, explained to GeekWire.

Ozden said the company’s secret sauce is its patented “Knowledge Graph,” which lets data analysts, business analysts, data scientists, enterprise architects, and others collaborate in a single, integrated system. The idea is to use machine learning and other technology to bring together siloed data and ultimately help drive better decision-making.

Maana competes against other tech giants like IBM and Palantir. The new funding will be used to scale Maana’s business. The company also announced that it has partnered with Accenture — also an investor — which will develop AI-based knowledge applications for industrial clients.

“This funding combined with the strategic alliance Maana has established with Accenture, demonstrates the demand for Maana’s cutting-edge AI-driven knowledge technology as a key enabler of digital transformation at the world’s largest industrial companies,” Ozden said in a statement.

Ozden founded Maana with Donald Thompson, a former long-time Microsoft employee who is the company’s president. Maana has additional offices in Houston, Saudi Arabia, and across Europe.

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