Somewhere inside an industrial company is a file that could settle an expensive argument. The machine was tested. The result was recorded. An engineer needs it. Unfortunately, the information may be sitting in a different system, a different department, or the digital equivalent of a cupboard nobody remembers buying.
Manuel Terranova has made a business out of this predicament. Peaxy, which he co-founded in 2012 and leads as CEO and president, connects industrial data so that companies can use it across an asset’s working life. Batteries, turbines and complex equipment supply the subject matter. Finding a useful relationship between scattered pieces of information supplies the plot.
His preparation included German literature. That detail is worth keeping near the beginning. Before Xerox, General Electric and Peaxy, Terranova studied literature and political science at Cornell. His subsequent master’s at Johns Hopkins covered international economics and international law. The route to industrial software took a few turns before reaching the factory gate.
The literature graduate goes industrial
At Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center, Terranova worked as an Internet program manager, designing and implementing e-business solutions for Xerox.com. The job put him at the point where a large organization had to make its activities work through a relatively new commercial medium. It was an early encounter with a recurring career problem: getting established businesses and developing technology to cooperate.
He joined GE in 1999. In its Corporate Initiatives Group, he worked on e-business strategy and helped co-found SupportCentral with two other employees. During 2001 and 2002, he led the knowledge-portal effort. A company’s accumulated expertise is valuable only when somebody can reach the part they need; that problem would follow him into his own business.
His responsibilities grew more physical. From 2002 to 2006, he was general manager and chief information officer for information management at GE Oil & Gas. He then ran PII Integrity Services, whose activities included pipeline integrity engineering, monitoring and geographic information software. Later came subsea production systems and commercial operations. The nouns in his working life had acquired considerable weight.
By the end of his thirteen years at GE, Terranova had held a senior role overseeing regional operations and global sales in Drilling and Production. His remit included a $5.2 billion portfolio. He also worked on a $200 million subsea equipment joint venture in sub-Saharan Africa. In 2010, Jeff Immelt awarded him GE’s Chairman’s Award for Technology and Innovation.
A startup with a filing problem
Peaxy emerged from stealth in November 2012 with a $2.5 million seed round and a fifteen-person team. Its initial proposition concerned software-based data storage and management. Hyperfiler, the product described at launch, was designed to operate independently of the underlying hardware and handle data volumes ranging from terabytes to petabytes. An early version was being evaluated by selected Fortune 100 companies.
Federico Faggin was among the early investors and served as chairman. The association connected Terranova’s young software business with a technologist whose career included designing the first commercial microprocessor at Intel. Peaxy’s present board identifies Faggin as a co-founder, too. Terranova had left a large company, but he was building in experienced company.
By 2015, his explanation of Peaxy’s work had a more memorable vocabulary. He described valuable engineering information as “crown jewel” data: measurements from tests and equipment, simulation results, and geometry such as drawings and three-dimensional models. These records could exist inside the same enterprise while remaining maddeningly difficult to bring together.
“It is incredible how often these data sets are unfindable and unsearchable.”
Manuel Terranova · 2015
He was concerned with the gap between a model and the evidence that could improve it. Test information needed to get back to the engineer validating a simulation. Otherwise, the model could drift away from reality, and the design could acquire extra margins to compensate. Storage architecture was entering an argument about how products were designed and improved.
There was a measurable business result along the way. In 2018, Peaxy appeared at number 327 on the Inc. 5000, with reported revenue growth of 1,506 percent over three years. It ranked thirty-sixth among software companies. Terranova credited the team. The number records a particular period of growth; the underlying work still involved making scattered information usable.
The 90-day surprise
Building the company exposed a different kind of missing connection. Terranova had arrived from GE with experience of a corporate culture that invested heavily in management development. Recruiting in Silicon Valley, he discovered that technical experience did not necessarily come with a history of being professionally managed. Accomplished people could still lack that support.
In 2015, he called the discovery “a huge revelation to me.” His response was practical. Peaxy introduced a 90-day Goals and Objectives program. Employees identified their goals for the quarter, then reviewed and discussed them with their line managers. The arrangement made company priorities something people could discuss in relation to their own work.
He also brought in veteran technology managers on a part-time basis. One helped employees think about their career progress and whether their work was stretching them. A startup can be wonderfully impatient about building the product. Terranova made room for the slower conversations about the people doing the building. The calendar, apparently, also needed an architecture.
- 01Set the goalsChoose the quarter’s individual priorities.
- 02Have the conversationReview the work with a line manager.
- 03Connect the workKeep individual effort aligned with company priorities.
Terranova’s documented approach at Peaxy in 2015.
Every battery gets a biography
Peaxy’s work with Eos Energy Storage gave the data problem a particularly tangible subject. The announced partnership adapted Peaxy Lifecycle Intelligence for an energy-storage company whose information stretched across research, manufacturing and operation. The aim was to connect those stages so that evidence from one could inform decisions in another.
The proposed modeling followed battery modules by serial number. Operating conditions could differ, and a useful forecast needed to account for the particular module. Comparing modeled behavior with field data could help investigate discrepancies. Connecting that investigation with the recorded materials and components could, in turn, help research and manufacturing teams understand what had happened.
That is a more intimate view of industrial equipment than a fleet average provides. A module acquires a history: what went into it, how it was tested, where it operated and how it behaved. Terranova’s company works on keeping that history connected. Even a battery, it seems, benefits from having its paperwork in order.
In October 2023, he took the subject to the eVTOL Show in Palo Alto, an event concerned with the commercial development of electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft. His presentation addressed the importance of properly curated cell-level battery data after charge and discharge cycles. The setting changed; his concern with the individual component remained recognizable.
Seven years behind the twin
In February 2025, Peaxy announced deployment of a hydrogen digital twin for a Fortune 200 client. The system modeled integrated renewable hydrogen plants, bringing configuration, operation and production economics into the same working environment. It could help assess equipment requirements and plant layouts, simulate operations and calculate the levelized cost of hydrogen.
Terranova said the technology had been in development for over seven years. That is a useful corrective to the apparent speed of a product announcement. Industrial software has to accommodate relationships among physical systems and commercial decisions. An attractive model earns its keep when it helps someone choose equipment, compare configurations or understand the consequences of operating a plant differently.
The company’s work also extended into collective energy management. In June 2025, Peaxy announced its involvement in CACIP’s Digital Energy initiative in Sardinia. The consortium has more than 400 member companies. Peaxy’s EcoGrid platform connected with infrastructure and collected real-time information from IoT devices to support energy decisions across the industrial community.
Here, the unit of attention expanded from an individual component to an industrial ecosystem. Consumption, production and shared energy resources needed to be understood together. It is a large setting for a familiar question: which pieces of information belong in the same conversation? Terranova’s career has repeatedly put him near that junction.
A useful place to land
There is an aviation connection outside the conference program. Terranova serves as vice chair of the Hiller Aviation Museum’s board. The role sits comfortably beside a working life spent around machinery and the systems used to understand it. A museum preserves the evidence of what people built; his company helps businesses use the evidence their equipment produces.
His public explanations travel through several formats. A 2020 appearance on The AI in Business Podcast addressed getting value from equipment and heavy-machinery data. He has also published writing on Medium and contributed to the Forbes Technology Council. The subjects keep returning to operational information and what businesses can learn from it.
The biographical details resist a tidy vocational forecast. German literature does not announce a future in subsea controls. International law does not point directly toward battery modules. Yet the sequence of jobs has a recognizable continuity: Terranova keeps encountering information that needs to cross an organizational or technical boundary before anybody can use it.
The useful file is still somewhere. An engineer still has a question. Terranova’s bet, sustained through Peaxy’s changes since 2012, is that bringing the two together is worth building a company around.