Bentley Systems has entered into a definitive agreement with investors led by Accel-KKR to acquire Seequent, the NZ specialist in software for geological and geophysical modelling, geotechnical stability, and cloud services for geodata management, visibility, and collaboration, for US$900 million in cash, subject to adjustment, plus 3,141,361 BSY Class B shares. The acquisition will deepen the potential of infrastructure digital twins to help understand and mitigate environmental risks, advancing resilience and sustainability.
Seequent, founded and headquartered in Christchurch, New Zealand, has more than 430 employees in 16 office locations, serving geologists, hydrogeologists, geophysicists, geotechnical engineers, and civil engineers in over 100 countries, and the world’s top mining companies. Its established presence in mineral-intensive geographies such as South America and southern Africa is expected to accelerate Bentley’s overall opportunities in these regions with significant infrastructure requirements. In turn, Bentley’s established presence in China, and its mainstay reach across civil engineering sectors, is expected to accelerate Seequent’s expansion in new markets.
Subsurface conditions comprise the ‘infrastructure of our infrastructure’ and literally underlie the earth’s major environmental risks. Bentley’s current offerings enable digital twins to incorporate what’s constructed ‘near surface,’ including foundations, drainage facilities, buried utilities, tunnels, and subsea structures. The addition of Seequent will now make it possible for infrastructure digital twins to reach full subsurface depths, augmenting environmental resilience against flood, seismic, climate, and water security threats.
Seequent first applied implicit modeling technology to geological science more than 15 years ago, using mathematical tools to derive and visualise 3D geological models from measured data and user interpretation. This software advancement caused a “leapfrogging” paradigm shift in the understanding of the earth’s subsurface and has been increasingly adopted by geoscientists and researchers around the world to uncover and visualize valuable insights about environmental conditions and challenges.
Seequent’s products include Leapfrog, its leading product for 3D geological modeling and visualisation, Geosoft for 3D earth modeling and geoscience data management, and GeoStudio for geotechnical slope stability and deformation modeling. Bentley’s complementary geotechnical engineering software portfolio, including PLAXIS, gINT, and OpenGround, will be integrated in due course to support open digital workflows from borehole and drillhole data to geological models and geotechnical analysis applications.
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