Cluster Insight with Nortech AI

– We handle all the messy data gathering groundwork so our clients can skip straight to building data value, says Francisco Roque, CEO at Nortech AI.

In this edition of our Cluster Insight series, we speak with Francisco Roque, CEO of Nortech AI, about unlocking industrial data and turning it quickly into valuable insight.

1. What does your company do?

At Nortech AI, we make industrial data accessible.

Essentially, we deploy directly to equipment control systems and handle all the messy groundwork of collecting, structuring, and cleaning data from multiple vendors.

The whole setup is remote and we can have it running in under two hours.

Once we've done that heavy lifting, our clients and partners can skip straight to building something valuable on top: dashboards, KPIs, predictive models, whatever they need.

We sum it up as: "Nortech does the groundwork. Together we build the intelligence.

2. Which markets or customers do you serve?

We focus on asset-heavy industries where keeping everything running is absolutely critical.

Maritime is where we started, We actually broke out of Rolls-Royce Marine, and from there we've expanded into mining and power generation.

On the customer side, we work with operators who own and run these assets – companies like Uptime, Ugland, and Seatrans.

We also work with OEMs and system integrators who need reliable, standardized data feeds to power their own digital solutions, such as Telenor Maritime and Kongsberg.

3. What is your key expertise or competitive advantage?

The team genuinely understands industrial environments.

We've got deep expertise in both industrial automation and Industrial IoT, so we know what we're walking into with these multi-vendor setups.

We're also fast, we've taken onboarding from six months down to about a week, which we proved on a recent MSC Cruises deployment.

Beyond that, we've built this on a partnership model rather than trying to own the whole stack. We handle the data groundwork so our partners can focus on creating value for the end customer.

4. What are you working on right now?

We've just onboarded MSHS/PPG in the US, which is a big step for us stateside.

The US is a strong focus market going forward. At the same time, we're launching a large initiative targeting the power generation business, that's a major growth area for us this year.

5. Your life motto / business motto

"Data is gold."

I've believed strongly in using data to guide business decisions my entire professional life. That conviction is really what drove me to build Nortech: making sure companies can actually access and trust their data, not just collect it.

6. Which cluster member would you like to hear from next?

I would like to hear more from Windkeeper.

Thank you for the insight Francisco.