A Houston-based startup wants to digitize procurement and bidding processes at oil and gas companies.
Launched in 2021 by co-founders Rodney Giles and Tyler Cherry, BidOut.app works with oil and gas clients, engineers and procurement offices on finding new service providers, soliciting and awarding requests for proposals, and more. The pair wanted to build a product that could enable anybody at the company, from an executive to a worker in the field, to create a formal RFP in 60 seconds or less.
"We really started looking at the inefficiencies of operators, trying to understand what their struggles and pain points were, and saw a weakness there," Giles said. "All the majors are using very sophisticated SAP, Oracle-type systems, but everybody else is not."
Since launching last year, BidOut has secured more than 450 customers on its platform. And after bootstrapping the company themselves up to this point, Giles and Cherry recently went out to raise investor capital to accelerate BidOut's growth.
BidOut raised pre-seed financing led by Denver-based Ascent Energy Ventures and other investors. The company declined to disclose the terms of the funding round.
"BidOut is creating a simple solution to a massive problem," said David Forsberg, managing partner at Ascent Energy Ventures, said in an announcement. "The capital and operational efficiency gains for operators and service providers alike makes using the BidOut platform an easy decision."
Using the proceeds from the funding, BidOut plans to hire another 10 employees in sales and development roles over the next year. The company has a high concentration of its customers doing work in the Permian Basin, so BidOut plans to establish a sales presence in Midland, Texas, in the near future.
"We cover every basin short of Marcellus, but it looks like we'll be picking up Marcellus here shortly," Cherry said.
BidOut currently has four employees: Giles, Cherry and two full-time developers. The company is headquartered in The Cannon, an entrepreneurial and startup coworking facility at 1334 Brittmoore Road.
