Data Firm Cipher Skin to Expand into Oil and Gas Industry After $5M Investment

By Brad Kramer March 2, 2021 View Profile

Denver-based data insight firm Cipher Skin announced March 2 it has raised $5 million in Series A funding to expand its product line and serve new markets. The investment group was led by the Boyett Petroleum, with participation from Draper Capital, Tribe Capital and TKC Capital.

Cipher Skin will work with Boyett Petroleum to detect and correct any flaws in its extended fuel distribution network.

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“Decaying energy infrastructure is a critical and underappreciated problem,” said Dale Boyett, president, Boyett Petroleum. “Pipeline leaks in particular are devastating for both industrial function and local communities. Understanding the scope of these problems and being able to predict and mitigate them within a retrofittable system is of tremendous commercial and societal value. Cipher Skin is offering a new way to find and prevent leaks that helps us increase our bottom line and efficiencies.”

At the core of Cipher Skin’s technology is Cipher Mesh, a network of sensors that can be printed on any textile and wrap around any physical object, from human limbs to bridges and pipes. This patented technology captures movement, retrieves internal metrics, and translates both into actionable, visualized insights through proprietary software, delivering diagnostics that can solve myriad challenges for a constellation of industries.

“Building a massive database to decode the world around us is central to our mission,” said chief operating officer and cofounder Dr. Shaka Bahadu. “If you think of data as the DNA of the physical world, the building blocks that hold unique information and shape the structure of everything, then we are mapping it at scale and providing actionable insights to offer valuable solutions that will transform how we tackle, and even prevent, the problems our world faces.”

The new round of investment brings total funding to $7.8 million and builds off the $1.5 million the U.S. Department of Defense awarded the company in June 2020 as part of the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program recognizing Cipher Skin’s innovative human performance application, which has also attracted customers including the Air Force Special Operations Command. This funding will help the company further develop the existing product line in the human performance industry and expand into new markets, including oil and gas.

“Cipher Skin’s technology has broad applications, which is evident from the interest we’ve received from top-tier investors across a variety of fields including data analytics, oil and gas, wine making and general disruptive tech,” said CEO and cofounder Philip Bogdanovich. “Our investors understand the power of accurate data and insights at scale, not assumptive algorithms that make vague interpretations from limited sources. We’re excited to prove the power of these measurements.”

Cipher Skin has experienced exponential growth, with revenue increasing by 3,200 percent from 2019 to 2020 and headcount grew 250 percent over that same period. The company expects similar growth rates in the upcoming few years by partnering with medical, wellness, athletic and industrial companies to embed its patented technology into their products. This will allow Cipher Skin to focus on managing and analyzing the data that it anonymously captures from all the licensed products as it fulfills its mission of building the largest and most accurate database of the physical world.

Cipher Skin was founded in 2017, built on technology that translates the physical world into actionable insights. The company’s Cipher Mesh technology captures gapless data and translates it through proprietary software to provide instantaneous, visualized data and diagnostics. Because of Cipher Skin’s versatility, there are nearly unlimited applications, from physical therapy and training to continuous monitoring in pipeline management. The brainchild of combat veterans, Cipher Skin has also countless military applications. At its core, however, Cipher Skin melds next-gen hardware and software to help make sense of our complex world and how we interact with it.