HighByte is an industrial software company based in Portland, Maine, founded in 2018 by Tony Paine, John Harrington and Torey Penrod-Cambra.
The company makes HighByte Intelligence Hub, industrial DataOps software for manufacturers and other industrial companies. The software collects data from the plant floor, adds context such as standard names and units of measure, and delivers the data to enterprise IT systems and AI platforms.
Tony Paine is the company's chief executive.
The co-founders held leadership roles at Kepware, a Portland industrial connectivity software company. Tony Paine was Kepware's chief executive. PTC, a maker of software that manages data throughout a product's life cycle, bought Kepware in 2016.
HighByte
SponsoredThe Intelligence Hub connects to devices, files, databases and other systems through open standards and native connections. Supported standards include OPC UA, the OPC Foundation's framework for machine-to-machine and machine-to-enterprise interoperability, and MQTT, a messaging protocol for connected devices.
Users build reusable data models in a code-free interface. The models give machine data standard names, merge in information from other systems and normalize units of measure. Users can import and export template definitions to replicate common datasets across assets.
The Intelligence Hub's pipelines filter, buffer, transform and compress data, then deliver the data on a schedule, when an event occurs or on request. A store-and-forward option buffers the data to disk when a target connection drops.
The software includes an MQTT broker that HighByte built, and a REST Data Server that acts as a gateway through which applications request plant data from the Intelligence Hub, raw or modeled.
The Intelligence Hub includes an industrial server for the Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open-source standard for connecting AI applications to outside systems. Through that server, AI agents can request live or historical data from any system connected to the Intelligence Hub.
The Intelligence Hub runs on hardware from single-board computers and industrial switches up to servers, in a plant, a data center or the cloud. The software installs on bare metal, on a virtual machine or as a container.
HighByte sells directly in the US and Canada and through distributors in other regions. The software is also sold through Microsoft Marketplace and through AWS Marketplace, the Amazon Web Services (AWS) catalog of software from thousands of sellers.
List prices, annual subscription
$18,500
Annual subscription license for a single factory.
$50,000
Three factories with central configuration.
$65,000
A customer cloud environment with a single data aggregation point.
Licenses are annual subscriptions. Enterprise pricing is quoted, and a free 30-day trial license is available.
HighByte's customers range from mid-sized to large manufacturers of industrial products, consumer packaged goods and pharmaceuticals. Companies using the Intelligence Hub span markets including automotive, energy, food and beverage, life sciences, and mining and metals.
Customers in HighByte's published case studies and talks
70% to 95%
The meal-kit maker moved from reactive to proactive maintenance using the Intelligence Hub, and raised mechanical availability from 70% to 95% in less than six months.
<15 min
The gas and electricity company moved from hourly batch updates, limited to 60,000 assets, to a streaming pipeline built with the Intelligence Hub and Snowflake, maker of the AI Data Cloud. The pipeline can process data from hundreds of thousands of devices with less than 15 minutes of delay.
15 countries
The oil and gas producer is unifying time-series data from assets around the world into one enterprise data platform, using the Intelligence Hub and Snowflake. ConocoPhillips built a pipeline strategy to speed up analytics and operational decisions across 15 countries.
Figures are as HighByte and its customers published them in case studies and talks.
Gerdau uses the Intelligence Hub to deliver plant data into the Databricks Data + AI Platform, for advanced analytics and digital twins. A digital twin is a data-driven virtual representation of real-world entities and processes.
Distributors provide training, pre-sales and post-sales support in Europe, Latin America, India and the Middle East.
Sources
HighByte ranked 613th on the 2026 Inc. 5000, with three-year revenue growth of 563%, and 232nd on the 2025 list. The 2026 list ranks companies by revenue growth from 2022 to 2025.
On the 2026 Northeast list of Inc. Regionals, which ranks companies by growth from 2022 to 2024, HighByte placed 23rd with 220% growth. The company placed sixth on the 2025 Northeast list.
Data Breakthrough, an awards program run by Tech Breakthrough, named the Intelligence Hub DataOps Solution of the Year in 2021 and HighByte DataOps Company of the Year in 2022. Tech Breakthrough's IoT Breakthrough program named HighByte Smart Manufacturing Company of the Year in 2022.
HiveMQ, which makes an industrial data platform and an MQTT broker, lists HighByte as a technology partner.
Sources
Not yet confirmed
Not yet confirmed with IDC or QKS Group, which sell the reports. Report pages from IDC, a research firm with more than 1,000 analysts, and QKS Group, a technology research and advisory firm, list HighByte among the vendors covered.
Partially confirmed
The figure appears on HighByte's page for an IDC report on seven HighByte customers. HighByte is an IDC customer, and IDC's case study of HighByte confirms the report without giving the figure. IDC calls the work both a joint business value study and an independent report.
Partially confirmed
Standard Investments, an investment firm focused on industry and technology, lists HighByte's Series A announcement. HighByte's filing of May 2, 2024, with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) reports $9,049,360 of securities sold.
Figures differ
HighByte's customer page and the story in their press kit give 25 countries. The press kit's fact list and IDC's case study of HighByte give 24. No outside source counts the sites.
Not yet confirmed
Not yet confirmed with IAF CertSearch, a global database of accredited management system certifications, or with AWS. ISO/IEC 27001 sets the requirements for information security management systems. Partners in the AWS AI Competency categories undergo technical validation by AWS.
Not found
No outside source names HighByte as the first, and the partner and trade sites that repeat the claim carry HighByte's own wording.
Sources
2018
Tony Paine, John Harrington and Torey Penrod-Cambra founded HighByte in August.
2019
The Maine Technology Institute, a publicly funded nonprofit whose mission is to grow Maine's economy, awarded HighByte two grants. A beta program for the Intelligence Hub opened in September.
2020
Version 1.0 of the Intelligence Hub went on sale in January. In April, HighByte signed their first distributors, Novotek AB in Sweden and ASP Dijital in Turkey.
2021
HighByte closed a fully subscribed $3.5 million seed round in December. Family offices led the round, including that of Seth Lawry.
2024
Standard Investments led HighByte's Series A round in April. Ben Sampson of Standard Investments joined the board.
2026
HighByte's July filing with the SEC covers a $5 million offering of debt and options to acquire securities, with $4,731,554 sold.
Office
163 Fore Street, fourth floorPortland, Maine
HighByte's office is at 163 Fore Street, fourth floor, in Portland, Maine. The company moved to a larger office in Portland in 2025.
LinkedIn and Inc. both put HighByte in the 11 to 50 employee range, and 48 LinkedIn members name HighByte as their employer. The Portland Public Library's abstract of an August 2025 article in Mainebiz, a statewide business news publication, puts HighByte at about 40 employees.
Tony Paine is chief executive, John Harrington is chief product officer, Torey Penrod-Cambra is chief communications officer and Aron Semle is chief technology officer.
Seth Lawry chairs the board, and the other directors are Tony Paine, Ben Sampson, Megan Buntain and Scott Harden.
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