Saudi Aramco buys 7.4% stake in Norwegian software firm Cognite

Saudi Aramco (2222.SE) has bought a 7.4% stake in Norwegian industrial software group Cognite from oil firm Aker BP (AKRBP.OL), Cognite said on Wednesday.

The price for the stake was “around 1 billion Norwegian crowns,” or about $113 million, an Aker BP spokesperson told Reuters, valuing Cognite at just over $1.5 billion.

Cognite and Saudi Aramco are in a partnership to provide digitalisation services in Saudi Arabia and the wider Middle East region.

“Cognite has proven that their technology delivers complex real time insights seamlessly and is optimising how energy is being supplied to the world,” Saudi Aramco Senior Vice President Ahmad A. Al-Sa’adi said in a statement.

Both Cognite and Aker BP are part of Norwegian billionaire Kjell Inge Roekke’s group of companies, whose investment firm Aker ASA has a 50.5% stake in Cognite.

U.S. venture capital firm Accel holds 12.4% while Cognite’s Chief Executive John Markus Lervik owns 7.2%, an Aker spokesman said in May last year.

($1 = 8.8313 Norwegian crowns)Reporting by Victoria Klesty, editing by Terje Solsvik

This article was originally published Reuters.