Christopher Robart leads Ambyint — a technology company creating the Nest thermostat for oil rigs — with his twin brother, Alex. Courtesy of Ambyint

Oil and gas startup exec positions Houston company for more growth in 2019

Featured Innovator

Most of Christopher Robart's 10-year career in oil and gas has been deliberate and calculated — researching the right startup to be involved in or finding the right buyer for a company he invested in. However, his actual start in the industry wasn't so intentional.

"I sort of fell into oil and gas after I got of college back in 2003," says Robart, who is the president of Ambyint USA. "Before that, I was involved in a few startup things — some digital and some not. I was always sort of an entrepreneur."

Robart shares the passion of entrepreneurialism with his twin brother, Alex, CEO of Ambyint. The two have similar work experiences, since they act as an oil and gas startup team in Houston. One of the first companies the duo bought and sold was PacWest Consulting Partners, which was sold to IHS Energy in 2014, Robart says. The second one, Digital H2O, they founded, grew the team, lead some investments, and sold it to Genscape in 2015.

The pair's newest endeavor is Ambyint, an oilfield smart technology company with Canadian origins. The Robart brothers have been involved in it for about two and a half years.

Christopher Robart spoke with InnovationMap about his career and what he hopes to accomplish with his oil and gas startup in 2019.

InnovationMap: How did you and your brother first get involved in Ambyint?

Christopher Robart: After we left IHS, we knew that our next up was going to be software and upstream oil and gas, but there were a lot of question marks. We did our due diligence. We leveraged all that information we found and settled on which market we wanted to be in. We ended up finding Ambyint and liked what they had built to date, but they had some gaps and shortcomings, particularly on the commercial side, and they had no U.S. presence. We thought those two gaps were something we'd be helpful filling out. We went through a fairly lengthy process to lead an investment into the company, and essentially took over through that process.

IM: So, Ambyint still has an office in Canada?

CR: The Canada office is primarily a technology office, with some sales capabilities up there. The U.S. is primarily sales, marketing, and customer support.

IM: How does the technology work?

CR: The easiest way to explain it is we're like a Nest thermostat for your oil wells. It's a piece of hardware and a piece of software. It's wired into the well's control system and tied up to cloud-based software. From there, we've been deploying artificial intelligence, machine learning, deep learning, etc.

IM: What do you look for in customers?

CR: Oil companies of any shape or size, really. Oil and gas industry aren't really known for being early adopters of technology. There's a lot of resistance to change, particularly at the production level, which we focus on. So we're looking for early adopters looking to lead the way.

We're in pretty much all the major oil-producing areas in the U.S. and Canada. We also have customers in Mexico, Chili, and Egypt. There's a few more countries in the Middle East we're trying to get into.

IM: Are you planning another fundraising round?

CR: We'll embark on a series B in the near future. We closed our series A, and it was pretty large, so we're in a good place. (The series closed in September of 2017 with $11.5 million raised, according to Crunchbase.)

IM: What are your goals for 2019?

CR: We've built a lot of cool technology, and we continue to do that. Our focus for 2019 is to continue to commercialize and expand our customer base. Our sales cycle is pretty long. It could be a year from the time we bring an initial lead to the table, running a pilot, getting results, and developing a plan. It's a long, slow, and, in some cases, a painful process.

When you're doing things like machine learning, you're teaching a machine how to do something a human would do something. What's required to do that is a massive amount of data to start, and from there, it's a never ending journey of data collection and monitoring your accuracy.

We've been focused on one specific artificial lift pump — every well will eventually take a piece of artificial lift pump. We work on the most common artificial lift pump, but it's just one of six key types. In addition to selling more of that pump, we are in the process of expanding to additional lift types.

IM: What keeps you up at night, as it pertains to your business?

CR: Change management. Getting our customers to adopt new technology and embrace change. That's it. We're constantly trying to get our customers to move more quickly.

IM: How do you and your brother work together? Do you each play different roles in the company?

CR: Our backgrounds are similar. We're twins, but we have personality differences. I spend a little more time with our customers than he does and with new product initiatives. I get pretty hands on.

His mandate is less focused on walking and talking with customers and more on managing the functions of the business and working with the leadership team. As well as financing and fundraising.

We've got a pretty good division of labor, but there is a lot of overlap of what we do.

IM: What are some of the pros and cons of being in Houston?

CR: Obviously the pro of being in Houston is it being the oil capital of the world. All our customers are here. It's sort of a must.

The downside of running a technology company in town is that tech talent is quite thin on the ground in Houston — especially what we're looking for. So, we don't have any tech team members in the Houston office. I'll put it mildly in that we are skeptical of the talent pool for really strong software developers in the Houston market.

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Portions of this interview have been edited.

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7 lessons from a Houston-based unicorn startup founder

taking notes

At a fireside chat at SXSW, a Houston founder pulled back the curtain on his entrepreneurial journey that's taken him from an idea of how to make the chemicals industry more sustainable to a company valued at over $2 billion.

Gaurab Chakrabarti, the CEO and co-founder of Solugen, joined the Greater Houston Partnership's Houston House at SXSW on Monday, March 13, for a discussion entitled, "Building a Tech Unicorn." In the conversation with Payal Patel, principal of Softeq Ventures, he share the trials and tribulations from the early days of founding Solugen. The company, which has raised over $600 million since its founding in 2016, has an innovative and carbon negative process of creating plant-derived substitutes for petroleum-based products.

The event, which quickly reached capacity with eager SXSW attendees, allowed Chakrabarti to instill advice on several topics — from early customer acquisition and navigating VC investing to finding the right city to grow in and setting up a strong company culture.

Here are seven pieces of startup advice from Chakrabarti's talk.

1. Don’t be near a black hole.

Chakrabarti began his discussion addressing the good luck he's had standing up Solugen. He's the first to admit that luck is an important element to his success, but he says, as a founder, you can set yourself up for luck in a handful of ways.

“You do make your own luck, but you have to be putting in the work to do it," Chakrabarti says, adding that it's not an easy thing to accomplish. “There are things you can be doing to increase your luck surface area."

One of the principals he notes on is not surrounding yourself with black holes. These are people who don't believe in your idea, or your ability to succeed, Chakrabarti explains, referencing a former dean who said he was wasting his talent on his idea for Solugen.

2. The co-founder dynamic is the most important thing.

Early on, Chakrabarti emphasizes how important having a strong co-founder relationship is, crediting Solugen's co-founder and CTO Sean Hunt for being his "intellectual ping-pong partner."

“If you have a co-founder, that is the thing that’s going to make or break your company,” he says. “It’s not your idea, and it’s not your execution — it’s your relationship with your co-founder.”

Hunt and Chakrabarti have been friends for 12 years, Chakrabarti says, and, that foundation and the fact that they've been passionate about their product since day one, has been integral for Solugen's success.

"We had a conviction that we were building something that could be impactful to the rest of the world," he says.

3. Confirm a market of customers early on.

Chakrabarti says that in the early days of starting his company, he didn't have a concept of startup accelerators or other ways to access funding — he just knew he had to get customers to create revenue as soon as possible.

He learned about the growing float spa industry, and how a huge cost for these businesses was peroxide that was used to sanitize the water in the floating pods. Chakrabarti and Hunt had created a small amount of what they were calling bioperoxide that they could sell at a cheaper cost to these spas and still pocket a profit.

“We ended up owning 80 percent of the float spa market,” Chakrabarti says. “That taught us that, ‘wow, there’s something here.”

While it was unglamourous work to call down Texas float spas, his efforts secured Solugen's first 100 or so customers and identified a path to profitability early on.

“Find your niche market that allows you to justify that your technology or product that has a customer basis,” Chakrabarti says on the lesson he learned through this process.

4. Find city-company fit.

While Chakrabarti has lived in Houston most of his life, the reason Solugen is headquartered in Houston is not due to loyalty of his hometown.

In fact, Chakrabarti shared a story of how a potential seed investor asked Chakrabarti and Hunt to move their company to the Bay Area, and the co-founders refused the offer and the investment.

“There’s no way our business could succeed in the Bay Area," Chakrabarti says. He and Hunt firmly believed this at the time — and still do.

“For our business, if you look at the density of chemical engineers, the density of our potential customers, and the density of people who know how to do enzyme engineering, Houston happened to be that perfect trifecta for us," he explains.

He argues that every company — software, hardware, etc. — has an opportunity to find their ideal city-company fit, something that's important to its success.

5. Prove your ability to execute.

When asked about pivots, Chakrabarti told a little-known story of how Solugen started a commercial cleaning brand. The product line was called Ode to Clean, and it was marketed as eco-friendly peroxide wipes. At the time, Solugen was just three employees, and the scrappy team was fulfilling orders and figuring out consumer marketing for the first time.

He says his network was laughing at the idea of Chakrabarti creating this direct-to-consumer cleaning product, and it was funny to him too, but the sales told another story.

At launch, they sold out $1 million of inventory in one week. But that wasn't it.

“Within three months, we got three acquisition offers," Chakrabarti says.

The move led to a brand acquisition of the product line, with the acquirer being the nation's largest cleaning wipe provider. It meant three years of predictable revenue that de-risked the business for new investors — which were now knocking on Solugen's door with their own investment term sheets.

“It told the market more about us as a company,” he says. “It taught the market that Solugen is a company that is going to survive no matter what. … And we’re a team that can execute.”

What started as a silly idea led to Solugen being one step closer to accomplishing its long-term goals.

“That pivot was one of the most important pivots in the company’s history that accelerated our company’s trajectory by four or five years," Chakrabarti says.

6. Adopt and maintain a miso-management style.

There's one lesson Chakrabarti says he learned the hard way, and that was how to manage his company's growing team. He shares that he "let go of the reins a bit" at the company's $400-$500 million point. He says that, while there's this idea that successful business leaders can hire the best talent that allows them to step back from the day-to-day responsibilities, that was not the right move for him.

“Only founders really understand the pain points of the business," Chakrabarti says. "Because it’s emotionally tied to you, you actually feel it."

Rather than a micro or macro-management style, Chakrabarti's describes his leadership as meso-management — something in between.

The only difference, Chakrabarti says, is how he manages his board. For that group, he micromanages to ensure that they are doing what's best for his vision for Solugen.

7. Your culture should be polarizing.

Chakrabarti wrapped up his story on talking about hiring and setting up a company culture for Solugen. The company's atmosphere is not for everyone, he explains.

“If you’re not polarizing some people, it’s not a culture,” Chakrabarti says, encouraging founders to create a culture that's not one size fits all.

He says he was attracted to early employees who got mad at the same things he did — that passion is what makes his team different from others.

Houston tech company to acquire IT infrastructure startup

M&A moves

Hewlett Packard Enterprise has announced its plans to acquire a San Jose, California-based startup.

HPE, which relocated its headquarters to Houston from the Bay Area a couple years ago, has agreed to acquire OpsRamp, a software-as-a-service company with an IT operations management, or ITOM, platform that can monitor, automate, and manage IT infrastructure, cloud resources, and more.

According to a news release from HPE, the OpsRamp platform will be merged with the HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform, which supports more than 65,000 customers, powers over two million connected devices, and manages more than one exabyte of data with customers worldwide.

The new integrated system "will reduce the operational complexity of multi-vendor and multi-cloud IT environments that are in the public cloud, colocations, and on-premises," per the statement.

“Customers today are managing several different cloud environments, with different IT operational models and tools, which dramatically increases the cost and complexity of digital operations management,” says HPE's CTO Fidelma Russo in the release. “The combination of OpsRamp and HPE will remove these barriers by providing customers with an integrated edge-to-cloud platform that can more effectively manage and transform multi-vendor and multi-cloud IT estates.

"This acquisition advances HPE hybrid cloud leadership and expands the reach of the HPE GreenLake platform into IT Operations Management,” she continues.

HPE's corporate venture arm, Pathfinder, invested in OpsRamp in 2020. The company raised $57.5 million prior to the acquisition. Other investors included Morgan Stanley Expansion Capital and Sapphire Ventures, per TechCrunch.

“The integration of OpsRamp’s hybrid digital operations management solution with the HPE GreenLake platform will provide an unmatched offering for organizations seeking to innovate and thrive in a complex, multi-cloud world. Partners and the channel will also play a pivotal role to advance their as-a-service offerings, as enterprises look for a unified approach to better manage their operations from the edge to the cloud,” says Varma Kunaparaju, CEO of OpsRamp, in the release.

“We look forward to leveraging the scale and reach of HPE’s global go-to-market engine to deliver our unique offering and are excited for this journey ahead as part of HPE.”

3 Houston innovators to know this week

Editor's note: In this week's roundup of Houston innovators to know, I'm introducing you to three local innovators across industries — from space tech to software development — recently making headlines in Houston innovation.


Michael Suffredini, CEO and president of Axiom Space

Axiom's CEO announced a new mission and space suit design. Photo courtesy of Axiom Space

It was a big news week for Axiom Space. The Houston company announced its next commercial space mission with NASA to the International Space Station a day before it unveiled its newly design space suit that will be donned by the astronauts headed to the moon.

“We’re carrying on NASA’s legacy by designing an advanced spacesuit that will allow astronauts to operate safely and effectively on the Moon,” says Micahel Suffredini, CEO of Axiom, in a statement. “Axiom Space’s Artemis III spacesuit will be ready to meet the complex challenges of the lunar south pole and help grow our understanding of the Moon in order to enable a long-term presence there.”

Called the Axiom Extravehicular Mobility Unit, or AxEMU, the prototype was revealed at Space Center Houston’s Moon 2 Mars Festival on March 15. According to Axiom, a full fleet of training spacesuits will be delivered to NASA by late this summer. Read more.

Julie King, president of NB Realty Partners

Houston's access to lab space continues to be a challenge for biotech companies. Photo via Getty Images

In terms of Houston developing as an attractive hub for biotech companies, Julie King says the city still has one major obstacle: Available lab space.

She writes in a guest column for InnovationMap that biotech startups need specialized space that can hold the right equipment. That's not cheap, and it's usually a challenge for newer companies to incur that cost.

"However, with realistic expectations about these challenges, the good news is that once settled into a facility that is a fit, Houston’s emerging biotech companies can thrive and grow," she writes. Read more.

Owen Goode, executive vice president at Zaelot

Houston software development firm Axon is planning its Texas expansion thanks to its recent acquisition. Photo via LinkedIn

Owen Goode is a huge fan of Houston. That's why when his software design firm, Axon, got acquired by Zaelot, led by CEO Jeff Lombard, in January, he made sure the deal would mean growth in the region.

Zaelot is a global, software firm with a presence in 14 countries, mostly focused in the United States, Uruguay, and Iceland. With the acquisition of Axon, the combined company is poised to expand in Texas, beginning in Houston, Goode says.

“Together we have a strong suite of offerings across a wide variety of domains including full-stack development, cloud/data engineering, design, staff augmentation, project management, and software architecture. We also have experience in multiple domains, including health care, aviation, defense, finance, and startups,” says Goode. Read more.