Validere, an oil and gas IoT and artificial intelligence platform, has secured $7m in seed funding to provide data and artificial intelligence (AI) insights to the oil and gas industry.
Image: Onshore drilling. Photo: courtesy of Stuart Miles/Freedigitalphotos.net.
The round included lead investor, Sallyport Investments, alongside Y Combinator, Real Ventures, Moment Ventures, and ZhenFund.
The new round of funding will fuel Validere’s US expansion and further the development of Validere’s new AI-powered blending, logistics, and trading optimization platform.
Oil and gas companies currently use unreliable product quality data to make critical operational decisions.
To address this problem, Validere is using Internet of Things (IoT) to radically improve confidence in product quality and AI predictive insights to guide optimal blending, logistics, and trading decisions. This optimization helps oil and gas companies get up to $9 more out of a barrel.
Validere co-founder and CTO Ian Burgess said: “More than $2T worth of crude oil is traded annually. As oil constantly changes hands, batches mix together irreversibly changing the product’s quality.
“The industry largely bases important operational decisions on poor quality data. Our platform not only informs product quality reliably and in real time, but it also uses AI to help oil and gas companies optimize product movement.”
Sallyport Investment owner Doug Foshee said: “Quality analytics represents a massive opportunity to push the industry forward. Validere’s strong cross-functional team, proprietary AI platform, and deep understanding of the industry uniquely positions them to add tremendous value to midstream and upstream businesses.”
Validere’s funding announcement comes on the heels of a breakthrough year. The company successfully completed IoT and AI platform deployments with large Canadian oil and gas clients and recently expanded into the US market by opening a Houston office. Validere was also recently named one of Canada’s top 20 most innovative tech companies by CIX (The Canadian Innovation Exchange).
Source: Company Press Release