True North podcast #9 with Julian Pereira (Trendminer)

On True North, I sat down with Julian Pereira, VP Product & Engineering at TrendMiner.  The company I founded and led for over a decade before its acquisition in 2018.Julian and I go back to a cold LinkedIn message in 2017. He'd seen what data validation looked like before it could scale, and he wanted to build something different.He joined TrendMiner in customer success, moved into product, and now runs product and engineering. Startup, Software AG acquisition, private equity buyout. A few things we got into:⚙️ Belsim → TrendMiner: how validation went from a six-month project to part of an analytics workflow📈 What actually changes after acquisition (startup → corporate → PE)🧠 Why industrial AI projects still struggle to move from pilot to production🤖 The shift from dashboards to copilots to agents🔗 Where industrial platforms fit in the emerging AI stackWhat stuck with me:– Data availability is not the same as data trust– "Good enough" worked, but not anymore. – Validation was always needed: teams just absorbed the cost quietly– LLMs are non-deterministic; industry needs consistency and explainability– Fixing data downstream hides the real operational issue– The historian gap is real: context gets lost between sensor and modelWhen we built TrendMiner, trust in the data was a hidden cost. With AI in the loop, it's the bottleneck.Worth a listen if you're building, buying, or running industrial AI.🎙️ True North Podcast