Major GE Vernova & PTC Assets Threaten Incumbent Providers with New Velotic Spinout

Private Equity (PE) firm TPG acquired GE Vernova’s Proficy portfolio (Manufacturing Execution System (MES)), PTC’s Kepware (industrial connectivity), and PTC’s Thingworx (Internet of Things (IoT) platform) businesses in 2025 for a total estimated US$1.1 billion. Velotic launches with a US$300 million revenue base, including customers from food & beverage, life sciences, automotive, and other discrete manufacturing, utilities, and infrastructure providers that will benefit from a unified platform for analytics.

Now, these entities are being fully unified under a new brand, Velotic, led by former business leaders from Hexagon, Rockwell Automation, and PTC.

Velotic’s focus is providing an integrated Industrial IoT (IIoT) stack from connectivity to the MES level. Hardware-agnosticism allows customers to avoid vendor lock-in and access insights without having to use disparate tools. For competitors such as Tulip, Critical Manufacturing, and Infor, Velotic’s creation of a unified data thread threatens their position as a plug-and-play MES.

For the composite companies, Velotic provides additional technical alignment for highly-related product areas. Kepware has been under the same roof as Thingworx (acquired in 2013) since 2015, when it was acquired by PTC. The new addition of Proficy enhances the data thread that Kepware and Thingworx create by unifying access via a MES and related data analytics tools in the Proficy suite.

Aside from the Proficy Smart Factory MES, Velotic also acquired the rest of the Proficy platform, which includes Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA)/Human-Machine Interface (HMI) capability (CIMPLICITY & iFIX), a data historian, a scheduler, and an industrial analytics platform that supports digital twin integration with Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML).

For Proficy, becoming part of Velotic provides something customers want out of their MES software: integration. Velotic’s single-stack platform positions it well to capture more of a fragmented market where there are 21 providers with between 1% and 10% market share (see ABI Research’s Manufacturing Execution System (MES) Software Market Data (MD-MES-25)). MES customers are reaching for solutions that are nested within a larger surrounding ecosystem—such as those provided by Siemens and Dassault Systèmes, which Velotic’s new stack moves toward.

IIoT platforms and MES software are an active Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A) environment due to the commoditization of device connectivity/management and the need for MES providers to differentiate.

The main points of differentiation in MES are AI offerings, integration within a company’s larger portfolio, and movement toward being a Manufacturing Operations Management (MOM) platform. Velotic partially achieves such differentiation through its AI offerings in Thingworx and Proficy, and extending its portfolio, but it is not as comprehensive in certain areas such as digital twins compared to larger competitors like Siemens and Dassault Systèmes. The jury is still out on whether Velotic will move Proficy toward an MOM.

Through the creation of a unified data thread in manufacturing operations, Velotic is challenging the base assumption of MES solutions, which is to be a layer on top of an established data thread. The three products that Velotic offers allow customers to think about how they consider an MES from the onset of IIoT implementation. However, Velotic is not alone. Tulip and Critical Manufacturing are expanding their AI offerings through acquisitions of Akooda and Convanit, respectively, in 2025; Siemens has nested its MES offering within its broader product portfolio, with Opcenter being a part of the Xcelerator platform; and Dassault Systèmes has moved toward an MOM with DELMIA Apriso.