Ambyint CEO Alex Robart Interviewed by Oil IT Journal

In this editorial, the Oil Information Technology Journal discusses Ambyint’s recent Series A investment from Statoil, and CEO Alex Robart explains why Ambyint is already ahead of the competition.

Full text:

Statoil invests in AI/big data oil country boutiques‘Series A’ funding rounds initiated by AI ‘startup’ Ambyint and seismic big data specialist Sharp Reflections catch VC arm’s eye. Statoil’s Tech Invest (STI) venture capital arm has made two recent investments in big data companies. Statoil participated in an $11.5 million ‘Series A’ funding round* launched by ‘artificial intelligence startup**’ Ambyint claims the industry’s largest repository of labeled training data (nearly 100 million operating hours and around 50 million terabytes) from its high resolution adaptive controllers. Ambyint’s data lake includes over 10 years of operating data from 1000’s of horizontal and vertical wells, sampled every 5 milliseconds, including more than 33 million Dynocards.

The funds will be used to expand deployments of Ambyint’s oil and gas artificial lift optimization solutions in the US and Canada, and to work towards the vision of autonomous well operations.CEO Alex Robart said, ‘AI has shown promise in multiple industries, but many attempts will fail, not because of poor machine learning techniques, but due to the lack of high resolution, labeled training data. We have over a decade of high quality data that we use to train and improve our analytical capabilities.

Moving upstream, STI has picked Fraunhofer spin-out Sharp Reflections (SR) for another (undisclosed) investment in a Series A financing round. Using pre-stack seismics is a tough ‘big data’ problem, a trilemma of data volumes (terabytes per day in acquisition), visualization and interaction.

STI MD Kristin Aamodt thinks SR is a potential market leader, ‘We have followed them for some time and have been impressed by their capabilities.

Following the equity investment, we now look forward to working with the team to achieve their ambitious goals and to contribute to commercializing Pre-Stack Pro.’ The investment will go towards sales and marketing activities and accelerated development of the scalable cloud computing platform. More on SR in our next issue.

* Other round partners are Mercury, GE Ventures and Cottonwood.

** A little puffery here given that the company (as Pumpwell) has been in business since 2004, has been working on its ‘next generation’ platform since 2012 and relaunched as Ambyint in 2015.