Innovative Canadian company taps into Houston market to better serve energy customers

in the pipeline

INGU Solutions has established its U.S. office in Houston — and is ready to tap into the city's energy industry with its revolutionary pipeline inspection-as-a-service model. Photo via ingu.com

On average, oil and gas pipelines are inspected every five years, which, considering pipelines in the United States are more than 60 years old, just isn't cutting it. Operators face costly and damaging leaks on cracks and incidences that are totally avoidable with more regular inspection. The issue is inspection isn't an easy process — unless INGU Solutions is involved.

The Alberta, Canada-based company has created a hardware component — called a Piper — that's about the size of a baseball. The device can be run through pipes of any size to inspect and detect internal issues. INGU has an inspection-as-a-service model so that whatever data is collected by the Pipers is analyzed and provided to clients without any more steps from them.

The idea for the device came to John van Pol, founder and CEO, who has a background in nuclear physics and founded the company in 2015. Now, he runs the company with his daughter, Anouk van Pol, who started as an analyst and working in the field for INGU and now serves the company as co-founder and COO.

The Piper is smaller than a baseball and can flow through any sized pipe used in the oil and gas industry. Photo via ingu.com

In 2017, INGU was selected to be a part of Chevron's inaugural Catalyst Program cohort and Chevron Technology Ventures — along with two other U.S. investors — contributed to the company's series A round in 2019. This led to INGU establishing its U.S. operations in Houston in order to grow their American team and to be closer to customers. Then, the pandemic hit.

“The idea was to be closer to our customers,” Anouk tells InnovationMap. “Houston is the oil and gas hub, and just being able to be in [our clients'] offices and be there in person it just helps. I hope at one point COVID passes and that we can make use out of it a bit more.

"The other thing is you open up your market on the hiring side," she says, adding that the company has two U.S. employees now.

INGU first had an office in The Cannon, but now operates locally at The Ion in the Common Desk coworking space with an office suite to support its local team. In 2019, the company was named to Plug and Play's inaugural Houston cohort and as a most-promising business by Rice Alliance at OTC.

Anouk, who was selected for Forbes 30 Under 30 in energy in 2020, and her father both split their time between Houston and Alberta, usually alternating so that the van Pols have a presence in each office at all times, but both are currently in town for the 34th annual Pipeline Pigging and Integrity Management conference, or PPIM. It's the OTC for the pipeline industry, Anouk says.

Ahead of the conference and despite the challenges the pandemic has posed for INGU, Anouk says the company has seen significant growth over the past two years.

"We grew 60 percent last year," she says. "which is pretty good for what's been happening over the past two years."

From a hardware perspective, the pandemic's impact has been relatively small. The Pipers are designed with off-the-shelf materials, which INGU stocked up on — avoiding any supply chain shortages. Additionally, INGU can send the devices to pipeline operators, who can deploy them while the devices send the collected data directly to INGU.

Anouk van Pol is the company's COO. Photo via LinkedIn

The company, which anticipates a secondary series A round this year in addition to tripling its annual revenue, has an environmental, social, and governance, or ESG, component to its business. While half of INGU's clients are in the energy industry and Pipers contribute to reducing waste within oilfield operations, the other half of customers are within the water industry. Water infrastructure is 100 years old, and Anouk says about 6 billion gallons of water are wasted each day.

"That's 40 percent of all water, and because so much water is lost, you need more power and energy," Anouk says. "Where we see oil and gas is aimed at prevention in well condition, etc., the water market is doing a lot of leak protection."

In both industries, Pipers are preventing waste and allowing companies to make positive moves in their ESG plans.

INGU has clients all over the world and servicing these various types of pipes and businesses is growing INGU's database, which better benefits their inspection-as-a-service capabilities.

"The more we grow, the more we can and will learn, and then go in this self-fulfilling cycle," Anouk says.

Using APIs, organizations can more easily combine their own internal data. Getty Images

Energy companies need to integrate new functions in order to better utilize data, says this expert

Houston, home to one of Cognite's U.S. headquarters, is the energy capital of the world. But while many oil and gas industry players and partners come together here, much of the data they use — or want to employ — remains siloed.

There's no lack of data. Connected devices are a wellspring of enterprise resource planning data, depth-based trajectories, piping and instrumentation diagrams, and sensor values. But incompatible operational data systems, poor data infrastructure, and restricted data access prevent organizations from easily combining data to solve problems and create solutions.

We understand these challenges because we work alongside some of the biggest operators, OEMs and engineering companies in the oil and gas business. Lundin Petroleum, Aker Energy OMV, and Aker BP are among our customers, for example.

Flexible, open application programming interfaces can address the challenges noted above. APIs enable users to search, filter and do computations on data without downloading full data sets. And they abstract the complexity of underlying storage formats.

As a result, data scientists and process engineers can access data in an efficient manner, spending more time on their use cases and less effort contending with technical details. Using APIs, organizations can more easily combine their own internal data. APIs also simplify the process of using data from industry partners and other sources.

Most companies have slightly different work processes. But common API standards can help a company combine software services and platforms from others in a way that matches its own business logic and internal processes. That can allow the company to differentiate itself from competitors by employing services from the best suppliers to create innovative solutions.

Standardizing APIs across the oil and gas industry would open the door to a community of developers, which could create custom applications and connect existing market solutions. Then more new and exciting applications and services would reach the market faster.

To ensure adoption and success of such a standardization effort, the APIs would need to be well crafted and intuitive to use. These APIs would have to include the business logic required to perform the operations to empower users. In addition, APIs would need to define and allow for the sharing of desired information objects in a consistent way.

Best practices in defining common APIs for sharing data within the industry include:

Introducing APIs iteratively, driven by concrete use cases with business value
Ensuring all services using the API provide relevant output and insights in a structured machine-readable format, enabling ingestion into the API to ensure continuous enrichment of the data set
Making all data searchable
Preventing underlying technology from being exposed through the APIs to ensure continuous optimization and allow companies to implement their technology of choice
Supporting all external data sharing through an open, well-documented and well-versioned API, using the OpenAPI standard

If oil and gas industry operators define APIs, suppliers will embrace them. That will "grease" the value chain, allowing it to move with less friction and waste.

Operations and maintenance are a natural place for API harmonization to start. Standardized APIs also can enable operators to aggregate and use environmental, equipment and systems, health and safety, and other data. That will accelerate digital transformation in oil and gas and enable companies to leverage innovative solutions coming from the ecosystem, reduce waste, and improve operations, making production more sustainable.

------

Francois Laborie is the general manager of Cognite North Americas.

Houston-based Tachyus closed a $15 million Series B round. Photo courtesy of Thomas Miller/Breitling Energy

Houston oil and gas software company closes $15 million round led by local PE firm

Money on the mind

It's pay day for Houston-based Tachyus. the data-driven software company has closed its Series B fundraising round at $15 million. The round was led by Houston-based Cottonwood Venture Partners, a private equity firm that funds companies using technology to solve problems within the energy industry.

Tachyus was founded in 2013 in Silicon Valley and recently relocated to Houston. The fresh funds will go into growing its cloud-based, artificial intelligence-enabled platform.

"In this economic environment, oil and gas operators need disruptive tools to optimize their fields," Tachyus CEO and co-founder, Paul Orland, says in a release. "This investment allows us to reach more customers and accelerate the delivery of new technology that improves our clients' business performance."

The company has already grown its client base and has customers in Argentina, Europe, and Asia. Tachyus joins several other tech-focused energy startups in CVP's portfolio, including Ambyint, Novi Labs, and SitePro. Houston-based Tudor, Pickering, Holt & Co. served Tachyus as its financial adviser.

"As the oil and gas industry evolves in the face of new commercial challenges, operators need to focus on getting the best performance from their assets, and Tachyus' technology has a track record of doing just that," says Jeremy Arendt, managing partner of CVP, in the release. "We are excited to partner with the Tachyus team to expand their reach and empower customers to optimize production across their fields."

Tachyus closed its last round in 2016 with a $4 million investment from Primwest, according to CrunchBase. Before that, the company had raised several million.

Last year, the startup restructured its C-suite. Tachyus co-founder Dakin Sloss transitioned from CEO to chairman, and Orland, who was previously CTO, took the reins, according to a release.

Paul Orland is CEO of Tachyus. Photo via tachyus.com

James Yockey is a co-founder of Landdox, which recently integrated with ThoughtTrace. Courtesy of Landdox

These two Houston software companies are making contracts less cumbersome for oil and gas companies

Team work

The biggest asset of most oil and gas companies is their leasehold: the contracts or deeds that give the company the right to either drill wells and produce oil and gas on someone else's land, or give them title to that land outright. A typical oil and gas company is involved in thousands of these uniquely negotiated leases, and the software to keep these documents organized hasn't been updated in more than a decade, says James Yockey, founder of Houston-based Landdox.

Landdox does just that: provides an organizational framework for companies' contracts and leaseholds. The company recently entered into an integration with Houston-based ThoughtTrace, an artificial intelligence program that can scan and pull out key words and provisions from cumbersome, complicated contracts and leaseholds.

With this integration, companies can use ThoughtTrace to easily identify key provisions of their contracts, and then sync up those provisions with their Landdox account. From there, Landdox will organize those provisions into easy-to-use tools like calendars, reminders and more.

The framework behind the integration
The concept behind Landdox isn't entirely new — there are other software platforms built to organize oil and gas company's assets — but it's the first company in this space that's completely cloud-based, Yockey says.

"Within these oil and gas leases and other contracts are really sticky provisions … if you don't understand them, and you're not managing them, it can cause you to forfeit a huge part of your asset base," Yockey says. "It can be a seven-, eight-, or nine-digit loss."

These contracts and leases can be as long as 70 or 80 pages, Yockey says, and have tricky provisions buried in them. Before the integration with ThoughtTrace, oil and gas companies would still have to manually pour over these contracts and identify key provisions that could then be sent over to Landdox, which would organize the data and documents in an easy-to-use platform. The ThoughtTrace integration removes a time-consuming aspect of the process for oil and gas companies.

"[ThoughtTrace] identifies the most needle moving provisions and obligations and terms that get embedded in these contracts by mineral owners," Yockey says. "It's a real source of leverage for the oil and gas companies. You can feed ThoughtTrace the PDF of the lease and their software will show you were these provisions are buried."

The origin story
Landdox was founded in 2015, and is backed by a small group of angel investors. Yockey says the investors provided a "little backing," and added that Landdox is a "very capital-efficient" software company.

Landdox and ThoughtTrace connected in 2017, when the companies were working with a large, private oil and gas company in Austin. The Austin-based oil and gas company opted to use Landdox and ThoughtTrace in parallel, which inspired the two companies to develop an integrated prototype.

"We built a prototype, but it was clear that there was a bigger opportunity to make this even easier," Yockey says. "To quote the CEO of ThoughtTrace, he called [the integration] an 'easy button.'"

The future of ERP software
Landdox's average customer is a private equity-backed E&P or mineral fund, Yockey says, thought the company also works with closely held, family-owned companies. Recently, though, Landdox has been adding a new kind of company to its client base.

"What's interesting is we're starting to add a new customer persona," Yockey says. "The bigger companies – the publicly traded oil and gas companies –have all kinds of different ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) software running their business, but leave a lot to be desired in terms of what their team really needs."

At a recent North American Prospect Expo summit, Yockey says that half a dozen large capitalization oil and gas producers invited Landdox to their offices, to discuss potentially supplementing the company's ERP software.

"Instead of trying to be all things to all people, we stay in our lane, but find cool ways to connect with other software (companies)," Yockey says.

Ad Placement 300x100

Ad Placement 300x600

CultureMap Emails are Awesome

Property Showcase

Houston claims 19% of Texas’ new live-work-play growth

by the numbers

In Texas, Houston is a big player in the live-work-play real estate movement.

A new 21-city analysis from coworking marketplace CoworkingCafe shows the Houston area added five live-work-play projects—mixed-use developments with residential, office and recreational components—over the past decade.

From 2016 to 2025, Houston accounted for 19 percent of Texas’ new live-work-play inventory, the analysis shows. Among the new local developments were Arrive Upper Kirby, St. Andrie, and The Laura:

Arrive Upper Kirby, which was sold in 2021 for $182 million, offers more than 61,000 square feet of retail and restaurant space adjacent to apartments and offices. The 13-story, 265,000-square-foot project was completed in 2017.
St. Andrie, a 32-acre, mixed-use community, was completed in 2019. The apartment-anchored development includes an H-E-B grocery store and 37,000 square feet of office space.
The Laura, spanning 110,000 square feet, was completed in 2023. Among the apartment complex’s amenities is a coworking space.

According to Northspyre, a software provider for real estate developers, live-work-play projects enable people to meet their needs, such as housing, workplaces, stores, restaurants, and recreation facilities, in a single place.

A total of 542 live-work-play developments opened between 2016 and 2025 in the 21 cities, with another 69 in the pipeline for 2026, CoworkingCafe says. Among major markets, New York City made up the largest share (119) of new live-work-play developments from 2016 to 2025.

The Houston area’s five projects were built in 2018, 2019, 2020, 2024, and 2025, CoworkingCafe data indicates, with another project scheduled for completion next year. The Greater Houston Partnership recently highlighted four mixed-use projects taking shape in the region, but only one of them is scheduled to be finished in 2027. It can take two to five years or more to complete a mixed-use development.

Of the five Houston developments finished in the past decade, 56 percent of the space went toward multifamily units, 29 percent toward offices, and 16 percent toward retail, CoworkingCafe says.

As noted by the Houston-Galveston Area Council, economic development in the 21st century “is about cultivating quality live-work-play environments that attract, retain, and grow a diverse and skilled population. Employers and businesses are increasingly choosing to make long-term investments in places that connect and engage people to strengthen economic competitiveness and promote innovation.”

With eight completed projects, Austin led construction of live-work-play developments in Texas from 2016 to 2025, according to CoworkingCafe. Dallas, which welcomed five live-work-play developments during that period, tied with Houston. San Antonio data wasn’t available.

Rice Business Plan Competition awards $1.4M to 2026 student teams

winner, winners

Editor's note: This article has been updated to correct the total amount of investment and cash prizes awarded at the RBPC and with additional information from Rice.

Another team from the Great Lakes State took home top honors and investments at this year's Rice Business Plan Competition.

BRCĒ, a material-tech startup from Michigan State University, took home the top-place finish and the largest investment total at the annual Houston event. It has developed Lattice-Grip technology to create utility-based polymers that can replace traditional fabric. The materials are stronger, fire-resistant and more stable than traditional textiles, according to the company. Last year, the University of Michigan's Intero Biosystems won first-place finish and the largest investment total of $902,000.

In total, the RBPC doled out more than $1.4 million in investment and cash prizes, according to Rice. Over the three-day event, held April 9-11, the 42 competing startups presented their business plans to 300 angel, venture capital and corporate investors. Seven finalists were selected.

Three Texas teams, including one from Houston, were named among the finalists. Here's who won big this year, with their investment totals and some of their awards listed below.

BRCĒ, Michigan State University — $611,500

The recent Shark Tank alum finished in first place for its utility-based polymers technology.

$200,000 Goose Capital Investment Grand Prize
$100,000 The OWL Investment Prize
$100,000 Houston Angel Network Investment Prize
$75,000 The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE) Texas Angels Investment Prize
$50,000 nCourage Investment Network’s Courageous Women Entrepreneur Investment Prize
$25,000 New Climate Ventures Sustainable Investment Prize
$20,000 Aramco Innovator Cash Prize
$1,000 Anbarci Family Company Showcase Prize
$500 Mercury Fund Elevator Pitch Competition Prize – Consumer Hard Tech

Legion Platforms, Arizona State University — $535,500

The startup won second place for its multiplayer gaming platform that can be accessed with slow internet speeds.

$100,000 Anderson Family Fund & Finger Interests Second Place Investment Prize
$200,000 Goose Capital Investment Prize
$100,000 The OWL Investment Prize
$25,000 Pearland EDC Spirit of Entrepreneurship Cash Prize
$500 Mercury Fund Elevator Pitch Competition Prize – Consumer

Imagine Devices, University of Texas at Austin — $111,000

The pediatric medical device company won third place for its multifunction neonatal feeding tube, known as Trinity Tube

$50,000 Anderson Family Fund & Finger Interests Third Place Investment Prize
$25,000 Pearland EDC Spirit of Entrepreneurship Cash Prize
$25,000 The Eagle Investors Investment Prize
$1,000 Anbarci Family Company Showcase Prize

Altaris MedTech, University of Arkansas – $16,000

The startup won fourth place for its pain-free strep test.

$5,000 Norton Rose Fulbright Fourth Place Prize
$1,000 Mercury Fund Elevator Pitch Competition Prize — Overall Winner

Routora, University of Notre Dame & University of Texas at Austin – $15,500

The team won fifth place for its route optimization app that works to reduce fuel costs, travel time and carbon emissions

$5,000 Chevron Fifth Place Prize
$500 Mercury Fund Elevator Pitch Competition Prizes — Digital

DialySafe, Rice University — $15,500

The startup won sixth place for its technology that aims to make at-home peritoneal dialysis simpler and safer.

$5,000 ExxonMobil Sixth Place Prize
$500 Mercury Fund Elevator Pitch Competition Prizes — Life Science

Arrow Analytics, Texas A&M University – $16,000

The startup won seventh place for its AI-powered sizing system for carry-on baggage.

$5,000 Shell Ventures Seventh Place Prize
$1,000 Anbarci Family Company Showcase Prizes

Other significant prizes included:

BiliRoo, University of Michigan – $26,000

$25,000 Southwest National Pediatric Device Consortium Pediatric Device Cash Prize
$1,000 Anbarci Family Company Showcase Prizes

BeamFeed, City University of New York – $25,000

$25,000 Amentum and WRX Companies Rising Stars Space Technology and Commercial Aerospace Cash Prize

Grapheon, University of Pittsburgh — $20,000

$20,000 Aramco Innovator Cash Prize

A total of $75,000 in in-kind legal services was awarded to all finalists. The grand prize winner, BRCĒ, also received a chief financial officer consulting prize worth $40,000. Each competing startup received at least $950 in prizes for placement in the competition.

“The Rice Business Plan Competition has grown into far more than a competition—it’s a proving ground for founders and a catalyst for real company formation, as well as a catalyst for building the Houston entrepreneurial ecosystem,” Brad Burke, associate vice president of Rice Innovation and executive director of Rice Alliance, said in a news release. This year's event was Burke’s final RBPC after nearly 25 years of leadership.

Last year, the Rice Business Plan Competition facilitated over $2 million in investment and cash prizes. According to Rice, more than 910 startups have raised more than $6.9 billion in capital through the competition over the last 25 years.

See a full list of this year's winners and stream rounds from the competition here.

Here's the income it takes to live comfortably in Houston in 2026

Money Talk

2026 report analyzing how much it costs to live "in sustainable comfort" in the biggest U.S. cities has found Houston residents have the 11th lowest salary requirement to live a comfortable life in 2026.

SmartAsset's annual report found single adult residents in Houston need to make $89,981 a year to qualify as "financially stable." Compared to last year, single Houstonians needed to make $83 more to live comfortably in the city.

Families with two working parents and two children need to make a household income of $204,672 to have a financially stable life in Houston, the report found. That's almost $2,000 less than what families needed to make last year.

To determine the rankings, SmartAsset's analysts examined 100 of the largest U.S. cities and used the latest cost of living data – such as the costs for housing, food, transportation, and income taxes where applicable – from the MIT Living Wage Calculator for childless individuals and for two working adults with two children.

For the purpose of the study, the 50/30/20 budgeting strategy was used to determine "comfortable lifestyle" costs for both individuals and families: 50 percent of income to cover needs and living expenses, 30 percent for "wants," and 20 percent for savings or paying down debt.

Here's breakdown of a Houston resident's comfortable lifestyle based on SmartAsset's findings:

$44,991 dedicated to needs and living expenses
$26,994 dedicated to wants
$17,996 dedicated to savings or debt repayment

This is SmartAsset's interpretation of a comfortable lifestyle for families of four:

$102,336 dedicated to needs and living expenses
$61,402 dedicated to wants
$40,934 dedicated to savings or debt repayment

SmartAsset said single individuals and families should compare the fluctuating local cost of living and their long-term goals to fully "understand the context" of their respective household incomes. But it's worth pointing out that a financially stable life in Houston isn't quite attainable for many residents: The city had a median household income of $64,361 in 2024, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Comfortable salaries in other Texas cities

Elsewhere in Texas, the report found that families in the Dallas-Fort Worth suburbs Frisco and McKinney "are closest to a comfortable salary."

"In Frisco, the median household earns $145,444 – substantially higher than the national median of $83,730," the report's author wrote. "This figure also accounts for 63.1 percent of the $230,464 income a family of four in Frisco needs to live comfortably. In McKinney, TX, the $124,177 median household income accounts for 53.9 percent of the $230,464 needed."

Both cities also tied with Plano for the 29th highest salary needed nationally to live comfortably in 2026. Single adults living in these cities need to make $109,242 a year to live a financially stable life this year.

On the opposite end, San Antonio has the lowest salaries needed to live comfortably in the U.S. Single adults only need to make $83,242 a year, and $192,608 for families of four.

View All Listings

INNOVATIONMAP EMAILS ARE AWESOME