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Artificial Intelligence Startup Ambyint Announces $11.5 Million Series A Investment to Boost Oil & Gas Production Optimization - Whitehawk Advisory

Written by Whitehawk Advisory | Jul 31, 2017 3:25:19 PM
Artificial Intelligence Startup Ambyint Announces $11.5 Million Series A Investment to Boost Oil & Gas Production Optimization
Mercury Fund Leads Series A With Co-investors Ge Ventures, Statoil Technology Invest And Cottonwood Venture Partners To Accelerate Innovation In Production Optimization
Ambyint, the emerging leader in AI-driven artificial lift and production optimization, today announced a $11.5 million Series A funding round led by Mercury Fund with participation by GE Ventures, Statoil Technology Invest, and Cottonwood Venture Partners. Funding will be used to expand deployments of Ambyint’s oil and gas artificial lift optimization solutions in the US and Canada, while continuing to build toward the ultimate vision of enabling autonomous well operations.
Well operators have responded to current market conditions by drastically reducing staff, but many have struggled to take advantage of recent advances in remote monitoring and data analytics that can have a substantial impact on reducing lease operating expense (LOE) of their existing fleet of producing wells. Operators who do gather data often lack the data science foundation or a large repository of training data to create value quickly.
Ambyint delivers substantial operating improvements to customers by combining the best of traditional physics-based methods with modern artificial intelligence and machine learning. Ambyint’s data science success is fueled by the industry’s largest repository of labeled training data, totaling nearly 100 million operating hours of hi-resolution data. Using Ambyint’s high resolution adaptive controllers, Ambyint continues to build both the size and quality of its industry-leading data lake. As a result, Ambyint has already helped customers show 20%+ reductions in LOE and as much as 10% improvements in production volumes, while improving safety.
“Ambyint’s ground-breaking artificial lift and production optimization solutions deliver compelling value to oil and gas producers,” said Alex Robart, CEO of Ambyint. “Artificial intelligence has shown huge promise in multiple industries, but we believe that many customer and vendor attempts to use advanced AI will not be successful, not because the core machine learning techniques are inadequate, but rather due to the lack of high resolution, labeled training data. Ambyint has spent over a decade building one of the largest repositories of high quality production and optimization data that is used to train and improve our advanced analytics capabilities. As a result, our customers see significant improvements in both operating expense and production volumes.”
Securing significant investments from leaders in the Industrial Internet, SaaS and digital oilfield investment communities support our market-leading technology and will enable us to scale our business with new offerings and geographic expansion, said Nav Dhunay, COO and Founder of Ambyint. “Our investors recognize how Ambyint’s production optimization platform changes the game by utilizing industry proven optimization algorithms with leading edge machine intelligence.”
“We believe there is no better time to invest in oilfield production efficiency and optimization given the expected industry trends for the next several years” said Adrian Fortino, Partner at Mercury Fund. “The combination of the management team’s industry expertise and network and the Ambyint platform and team was the perfect fit for our investment themes.”
“The application of artificial intelligence for artificial lift optimization offers a unique opportunity to not only enhance production but also improve overall production efficiency,” said Desikan Sundararajan, Team Lead for Statoil’s Research & Technology group. “Furthermore, this level of automation will also provide operators with active real-time monitoring of wells and likely reduce the number of site visits, thereby minimizing Health, Safety and Environment (HSE) risks.”
Despite the uncertainty in the oil and gas market, we’ve seen several themes hold constant over many cycles in the industry, said Ryan Gurney, Managing Partner of Cottonwood Venture Partners. “The need for improving operational efficiency through the application of advanced technologies is now more important than ever. We are just at the beginning of seeing what artificial intelligence, data science and distributed sensor networks can do to disrupt the status quo. Ambyint has emerged as a leader in the segment by delivering cutting-edge solutions to its customers.”
About Ambyint
Ambyint delivers an Artificial Intelligence (AI) Driven automation and analytics solution for artificial lift optimization that builds on traditional physics-based techniques. Built on 10+ years of domain expertise, Ambyint automates diagnosis, automatically adjusts operating parameters, and predicts failures, resulting in improved production and reduced LOE. Customers deploy the Ambyint Production Optimization Platform either with existing customer SCADA systems or with Ambyint’s High Resolution Adaptive Controllers, which enable higher resolution data acquisition and automated control for artificial lift systems. For more information, visit www.ambyint.com.
About Mercury Fund
Mercury Fund is an early-stage venture capital firm. With over $200 million under management, Mercury focuses on entrepreneurs and technology innovation originating in the U.S. Midcontinent. Our investment themes target SaaS, Cloud, and Data Science/AI platforms that make the industrial ecosystems of Middle America more competitive and efficient. For more information, please visit www.mercuryfund.com.
About GE Ventures
GE Ventures identifies, scales and accelerates ideas that will help make the world work better. Focused on the areas of software, advanced manufacturing, energy and health care, GE Ventures combines equity investing, new business creation, licensing and technology transfer to deliver an innovation platform designed to drive growth for partners and GE. For more information, visit http://www.geventures.com, or follow on Twitter (@GE_Ventures) and LinkedIn.
About Statoil Technology Invest
Statoil Technology Invest is Statoil’s corporate oil and gas technology venture unit managing a portfolio of some 20 early phase technology companies and investing in ventures with the purpose of providing substantial operational value to Statoil as a user of technology as well as solid financial return. Statoil is an international energy company with operations in 37 countries. We are headquartered in Stavanger, Norway, with approximately 21,000 employees worldwide, and are listed on the New York and Oslo stock exchanges.
About Cottonwood Venture Partners
Cottonwood Venture Partners (“CVP”) is a Texas-based venture capital firm partnering with companies that provide digital solutions for the oil & gas industry. CVP invests in digital technology companies that have achieved early customer adoption and require capital to accelerate growth. CVP leverages its expertise and relationships in energy and technology to help drive growth at its portfolio companies. For more information, please visit www.cottonwoodvp.com
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