Texas companies, including startups in the Bayou City, took home top honors from the Rice Alliance Energy Venture Day at the Offshore Technology Conference.
Fourteen companies operating in the energy technology space pitched at the Rice Alliance event Aug. 16, including four companies with presences in the Houston region. The pitch competition took place alongside OTC, which is being held at Houston's NRG Park this week.
Here are the local companies:
AlabasTron Technologies
Houston-based AlabasTron Technologies develops connected industrial devices and digital services designed to help oil producers reduce downtime and optimize production. The firm's sensor devices detect organic and inorganic deposits that form inside of pipelines before they become larger problems for oil producers.
DataSeer
DataSeer is a Houston-based cloud software company developing an application to automatically detect, label and extract data and information from engineering diagrams, lists and reports. The artificial intelligence-powered application continuously trains on tens of thousands of diagrams to improve its data detection capabilities.
Idare
Houston-based Idare is a software-as-a-service company that creates digital replicas of offshore assets in oil and gas, wind and solar — "digital twins" that are configurable in 2D and 3D GIS space. The asset twins show metadata on offshore energy assets and assist in offshore energy field modeling. The firm plans to release capabilities for real-time data visualization later this year.
Roboze
Roboze, an Italian manufacturer of industrial 3D-printing technology, recently relocated its U.S. operations to Houston from Chicago. The company works with many customers in energy, aerospace, automotive, consumer electronics and more to produce customized, 3D-printed materials. Roboze also develops and sells its own industrial 3D printers. The company, headquartered in Bari, Italy, leased around 7,000 square feet at 7934 Breen Drive for a manufacturing facility in northwest Houston.
After each of the 14 energy tech companies pitched before a panel of venture capital and industry professionals, the virtual audience voted on the four most promising startups from the competition. AlabasTron and DataSeer were both selected as most promising companies, in addition to Applied Bioplastics and American Hydrogen.
Austin-based Applied Bioplastics combines plastic with plant fiber to produce plastics that are comparable in quality and price to plastics made with petrochemical sources. Applied Bioplastics took part in the MassChallenge accelerator program in Austin in 2020, and the firm was one of the inaugural members of the Greentown Labs incubator location in Houston. Applied Bioplastics also won the Social & Culture category at the 2021 SXSW Pitch Event.
Tulsa, Oklahoma-based American Hydrogen develops integrated services for hydrogen generation, storage and distribution facilities. The company offers on-site hydrogen-as-a-service as well as turnkey facilities for modular and large-scale generation and storage.
The Rice Alliance Energy Venture Day was one of many events underway on the first full day of the OTC 2021 conference, taking place this week both virtually and in-person. Oil field services giant Schlumberger Ltd. (NYSE: SLB) withdrew its participation from the conference late last week, citing the recent rise in Covid-19 cases and hospitalizations. The 2021 conference was already expected to be significantly smaller than in past years due to ongoing limitations on international travel during the pandemic.
OTC's 2020 conference was canceled completely due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
