Cognite is expanding its office in Austin by hiring 30 employees to its team, the company announced July 29.

Cognite is a global software-as-a-service company, meaning it creates software to solve problems for clients and provides certain services for clients in the oil and gas, power and utility, manufacturing and clean energy markets.

Established in North America in 2019, the Austin office at The Domain, located at 3200 Gracie Kiltz Lane, Ste. 200, opened in May 2020. The company is only adding more employees but could physically expand in the future, said Trygve Ronningen, executive vice president of operations in North America.

With 20 employees stationed in Houston, Ronningen said the company sees great opportunity to expand its 30-person Austin team due to increases in demand.

“All of these areas [we serve] have been growing rapidly, so interest in our products and services has exploded,” Ronningen said. “By nature, oil and gas is a useful thing, but we see a lot more demand for oil and gas and power and utilities, even wind and solar, in Austin because of the great community of talent here.”

Opportunity Austin, an economic development initiative through the Austin Chamber of Commerce, is assisting Cognite with its growth. Opportunity Austin helped find skilled individuals for Cognite’s summer internship program that had four interns out of a pool of 2,000 applications. Ronningen said the initiative is further helping with hiring employees.

Austin is an ideal city to expand in not only because of the demand and supply of workers, but because the diversity in Austin matches the global diversity of their company, Ronningen said.

“Cognite has always focused on diversity, and with the 500 employees we have today, we’re coming from 60 different countries,” Ronningen said. “I think Austin is an area where diversity is flowering. We want to add on to the same culture Cognite is all about.”