Novity, a Leading Provider of Predictive Maintenance for Process Industries, Announces Strategic Investment from Acario Innovation

SAN FRANCISCO, May 20, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Novity, the leading predictive maintenance platform for process industries, announced a strategic investment from Acario Innovation ("Acario") the corporate venture capital division of Tokyo Gas. Tokyo Gas is simultaneously the largest gas utility in Japan and a globally diversified energy company with businesses spanning LNG, natural gas, electricity, and energy solutions serving over 13 million customer accounts.

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 $500,000 per hour. 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 United States. 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 centers, reliability has become a major concern further downstream from natural gas supply. Operators are prioritizing speed to power, which has created a surge in behind-the-meter (BTM) power projects. Nearly 20GW in BTM power generation was announced in ERCOT alone in 2025 (35% of nationwide), with another 10GW through April of 2026. The majority of these assets are gas-fired turbines, which require a high level of reliability to ensure the onsite power is dispatchable. Novity is well positioned to provide stability and uptime in this asset class and the associated hybrid configurations that utilize 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," 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.. We believe Novity is a powerful solution to address maintenance challenges in this regard, with the potential 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 observed 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.

About Novity

Novity provides truly predictive intelligence purpose-built for industrial reliability teams in the energy and process industries. The company's TruPrognostics AI platform combines physics-based models, machine learning, and contextual AI to diagnose faults, forecast remaining useful life, and recommend specific maintenance actions for rotating machinery and other industrial assets. Every model is transparent about what it can detect, what data it needs, and where its limits are. Novity works with data customers already collect, with diagnostic true positive rates routinely above 90% and proven deployments across upstream and midstream oil and gas, LNG terminals, and wastewater operations.

Learn more: www.novity.us

About Tokyo Gas Co., Ltd.

Founded in 1885, Tokyo Gas Co., Ltd. is Japan's largest provider of city gas primarily in the Tokyo metropolitan area and surrounding Kanto region. Since the liberalization of Japan's electricity market, it has also been providing electricity in the same area. As of its group's management vision "Compass2030," Tokyo Gas promotes the challenge of achieving "Net-Zero CO2" and will lead the transition to a carbon-neutral society.

For more information about Tokyo Gas, visit www.tokyo-gas.co.jp.

About Acario Innovation LLC.

Founded in 2017 and headquartered in Silicon Valley, Acario Innovation LLC is the corporate venture capital and open innovation division of Tokyo Gas Co., Ltd. The name "Acario" comes from the word "Akari," which means "light" in Japanese. Acario is focused on funding market leading companies in the new energy economy, sustainability and digital transformation sectors, including mobility, energy storage, and next-generation customer and energy services. As a dedicated subsidiary of Tokyo Gas, Acario plays a key role on the path to Compass 2030, as outlined by Tokyo Gas.

For more information about Acario, visit www.acarioinnovation.com

SOURCE Novity