Yasmine Al-Hussein

Investment Associate, Accelerate Fund

Liz O’Connell

CEO & Founder of Arolytics

Our founding story is one of ‘right place, right time’. Five years ago, our three founders met at one of North America’s largest academic research groups on emissions. We spent years working with large emissions datasets and have collectively visited over 10,000 oil and gas sites doing large scale measurement studies. We quickly saw the opportunity to commercialize when new emissions regulations were coming down the pipe in Canada, and most companies were still using spreadsheets and estimating emissions. That regulatory driver helped to create urgency, shifting our work from a nice-to-have research project into a need to help companies build emission reduction strategies.

Yasmine Al-Hussein

Benjamin Kemp

CEO of Ambyint

While I’m not proficient in production engineering and downhole physics, I saw how Ambyint was using AI and the performance gains it was delivering for oil and gas producers and knew it would be a game changer. When I got the opportunity to join Ambyint, initially to lead operations in Canada and then the overall company, I joined the journey.

Yasmine Al-Hussein

Benjamin Kemp

The feedback from our customers is they want us to generate an economic win while they’ll entertain what we can do on the sustainability side. It’s a definite win that Ambyint can increase our customers’ profits and drive a sustainable outcome, but the economic win is the foundation of the relationship.

Additionally, I can’t underscore enough what trust means in our business. The pace of change goes at the speed of trust. Most of our customers are engineers by background, their natural instinct is to build solutions themselves. When we’re offering to help them, we need to build trust as an external partner and demonstrate the value of working with us.

Liz O’Connell

Emission mitigation is an interesting space because there is a regulatory driver, but there’s an operational efficiency angle as well. Leaked emissions and leaked methane are lost products these companies are trying to conserve and sell. We offer a regulatory, ESG, and operational value proposition. This can make the sales cycles more complex, but it also drives a larger value proposition across the company.

Beyond strong ROI, building trust is also key. We have a team of emissions advisors who either come from the industry or they’re data scientists in this space who deeply understand the pain points of our customers.

We’re often first educating customers on the changes in the regulatory landscape and the new technologies and sensors that are coming out. We then work with them to build out an approach that solves their specific problems, and leveraging our solutions, whether it’s our emissions modeling software tool, our cloud-based integrated emissions platform, or our emissions advisory services.

Yasmine Al-Hussein

Liz O’Connell

We’ve been lucky to find investors who understand the need for cleantech, especially to lead our last round which we closed in September of 2023. But it comes back to the ROI. Even for cleantech, the solution still needs to save time or money or provide concrete value. We’ve been able to build out a tangible, concrete value proposition that is beyond an ESG-only story. The businesses we sell to are driven by shareholders and the share price. We’ve been grateful to find investors who see both sides of that coin.

Benjamin Kemp

When we started a raise at the end of 2022 going into 2023, it was really rough. There was a sort of an anti-oil and gas movement going on. We had pressure from a few investors to move away from oil and gas and into other verticals, such as the wind sector. But we believe you need to be good at what you’re doing before you move to the next thing. Too often, if you pivot too early, you lose your credibility.

We held our ground and now the market sentiment is in a more sensible place. We found investors who believe in true quality companies, especially in recession-like market conditions. One of Ambyint’s strengths is the consistency of our performance. We’ve been able to consistently grow quarter over quarter. That’s not easy to do as you’re scaling your company.

This has caught the eye of new investors, and helped our existing investors know their money’s being deployed effectively. We’ve been lucky to land on a set of investors who see our potential, and we hope to continue to grow with them for the foreseeable future.

Yasmine Al-Hussein

Benjamin Kemp

We’re fortunate to be working with organizations like Amii, who are helping us reinforce our lead position in AI. And it’s especially great to hear their feedback when they look under our hood and go, wow, you have built something quite special here in terms of scalable AI, that uses physics to inform the models for an industrial controls problem.

I was recently in Houston at the SPE Artificial Lift Conference, and their keynote was about AI, ML, and CO2e emissions. I was partly excited because Ambyint has demonstrated proven impact in all those areas. In the same breath, it made me feel a high sense of urgency. We are hitting exactly what the market needs right now, and our focus is how to capitalize on being at the right time and the right space before that window of opportunity shifts. And if another door opens, how can we get ready to pivot?

Yasmine Al-Hussein

Benjamin Kemp

It’s an interesting dynamic. High-innovation companies have ideas that haven’t necessarily been done or executed before. Customers may even tell you all the reasons why not to build what you’re about to build.

When we first came out to market, we were the only firm globally that could closed-loop automate the running of a wellhead using our physics engines and algorithms. It was a big leap of faith to bring the customer on that journey.

Now we have many customers using our platform daily and our focus on the voice of the customer is the highest it has ever been at the company. If a customer says this needs to mirror my operations and the way I go about it on a daily basis, we listen. We’ve invested heavily in our UI, UX, dashboards and visualization to best serve customers on the platform.

Another key turning point is that our commercial sensitivity and leadership are where we need to be. There’s a commercial reality to a business that’s taken in material capital and is trying to make a meaningful difference on a global scale.

There’s pressure to get to the next stage as a company. Those stage gates can be quite uncomfortable. Sometimes you need to talk about different people or a different vision or a slightly different operating approach. We’ve evolved and demonstrated our ability to be agile, pivot, and get where we need to go.

Liz O’Connell

We went the VC route in 2021 and raised our first round of capital. That’s really when we intentionally restructured our company as a SaaS company with a product, and an engineering team. We need to be looking at data security and data integrity very closely to sell to these massive organizations. We went down a different path after we raised that first round of capital and have not looked back.

We still get pulled in a lot of directions. “Oh, agriculture has a methane problem.” Absolutely, we’d love to address these new verticals longer term, but we need to do one thing at a time, which is focus around which vertical, pain point and customer problem we’re solving. And solve that really well. That’s the path we’re on right now.

Yasmine Al-Hussein

Liz O’Connell

The next challenge for us is to continue scaling and expand our footprint in markets such as the U.S. in particular.

Our platform has to be scalable and relevant to evolving regulations across multiple jurisdictions. The first customers on our software platform were Alberta-based companies, and there are specific data structures, specific regulatory reporting codes and other things relevant to Alberta. But that’s only going to last for so long. We’ve invested a lot into our platform to avoid that kind of technical debt as much as possible, which took time. We have a broader, scalable mindset that can withstand various state requirements and federal rules and be flexible and adaptable.

There’s a global shift towards emissions measurement from emissions estimation, and we’re perfectly positioned to capitalize on this opportunity, but timing is of the essence.

Benjamin Kemp

Another opportunity is to round out our offering. In the artificial lift world, there are four major artificial lift types and we automate three of the four. Our customers are coming to us saying, how quickly can we move on that. We’re looking to take a new product to market next year, enabling us to round out the life cycle of the well. Building a new product is not an inexpensive exercise. There’s some efficiency as we’ve done this a few times.

Given the impact that we’re having on industry events like venting and flaring, we’d also like to tap into the non-diluted capital related to R&D and methane mitigation. Now that we’re a Canadian entity, we can participate in awesome grant programs such as the ones provided by Emissions Reduction Alberta, Alberta Innovates, CRIN, and NGIF. We could do so much more in the methane reduction space!

Yasmine Al-Hussein

Liz O’Connell

Benjamin Kemp

I’d encourage folks in the tech sector to be proactive and spend a portion of your working week learning about the new talent available in the market, whether you’re hiring now or not. It can be hard when you’re busy scaling a company, but you should never be in a position where someone says, I’m stepping away from the company, and you don’t have a plan of who you would call.

On the investment side – just like technology businesses need to research on right-fit investment firms, I’d encourage investors to reciprocate and ask hard questions about the company’s true AI capabilities.