Meet Sean Murphy, CEO & Founder, PingThings
Providing Data and AI services for large utilities
Meet Sean Murphy, CEO and Founder of PingThings, and learn more about his journey from Oxford to launching and building the company, PingThings, that provides data and AI services for large utility companies.
What did you study at Oxford?
I completed an MBA at the Saïd Business School, matriculating in 2006.
Most important takeaway from time at Oxford?
How to face ambiguity.
Did your Oxford experience contribute to starting the company?
Yes, absolutely.
Did you always think you would be an entrepreneur?
No, it became obvious later.
Advice you would give an aspiring founder?
First rule of start-up club: don’t die.
What motivated you to start PingThings?
While at Johns Hopkins, I worked in the Energy Transition space, and identified there was a gap in the market dealing with fast data.
What is the problem the company is solving?
At PingThings we are processing and analyzing high frequency machine-generated data. The Energy Transition currently underway is creating the need to integrate and process huge volumes of data from new energy sources, such as solar.
Why is this an important problem to solve?
Data is produced in huge volumes at a macro level, but issues are found at a micro level.
How is PingThings solving the problem in an innovative way?
We have developed a proprietary platform for traversing large data sets in a highly performant way.
What are the biggest struggles you have experienced as a founder?
The pandemic ranks up there as one of the biggest struggles that no-one was truly prepared for. Also as a founder, hiring is one of the bigger challenges, finding talented new hires that know this industry and have the necessary skills to execute.
Why is the Oxford Angel Fund excited about this investment?
The market opportunity for PingThings as the time series platform for the Energy Transition is very large with an overall TAM >$1 Trillion. The opportunity in energy alone is huge, and we see the opportunity for the PingThings platform to be used in multiple industries as a generalized solution for a problem that is pervasive in data.
PingThings
AI and data services for utilities.
Founders: Sean Murphy
Founded: 2017
Stage: Series A, 2021
Notable Investors: ChampionX, Denham Capital, Raptor Group
PingThings is a very fast time series platform, providing AI and data services to enable the Energy Transition, and integration of new energy sources such as solar.