Author: Michelle Kung

Oil and Gas companies are trending toward automation and intelligent, interconnected systems to improve their businesses. One startup at the forefront of this movement is Osprey Informatics, which develops and provides cloud-based intelligent visual monitoring solutions for the oil and gas industry.

Prior to co-founding Glia in 2012, Justin DiPietro and Dan Michaeli were working with Accenture. Though their original project was to figure out how this retailer could compete against rising e-commerce rivals, they quickly realized that the company’s greatest strength was not its prices, but rather its employees. Realizing they needed to compete with the convenience of online rivals, DiPietro explains, the business needed to find a way to “bring the in-person customer experience online.”

This October, more than 200 investors and entrepreneurs will gather in New York City for a pitch and panel event where four seasoned founders, whittled down from a list of 200 contenders, will compete for a $20,000 prize. Just one winner will snag the cash, but no one will walk away empty-handed, since the event is designed to provide female founders with the contacts, funding, networking opportunities, and resources that male founders have already been receiving for decades.

Complete Auto Reports (CAR) is the brain child of New Jersey-based car mechanic Ricardo Da Cruz. Cruz shares how these challenges inspired him to build his own enterprise software, how that software works, and where he sees the industry going next.

Sarah Nahm is the CEO at Lever, a software company in San Francisco that’s building modern talent software to help companies power their next-generation recruiting. For Nahm, a typical day is shaped by a series of highly intentional interactions with her team. Some of these are scheduled, some are serendipitous, all are crafted to prime her employees, and therefore her company, for success.

As Reid Hoffman says, starting a company is like “jumping off a cliff and building an airplane on the way down.”  It’s hard. Very, very hard! And being an entrepreneur can be one of the loneliest places on Earth, especially when you’re staring down a challenge that you’ve never seen before and don’t know who to turn to. That’s why AWS and Masters of Scale are partnering to create this unique opportunity for startups to help startups. 

Oil and gas operators are feeling the pinch. “Their wells are underperforming, so they can’t get enough oil out of the ground and they are missing financial forecasts,” says Josh Ulla, Chief Development Officer at Deep Imaging. Analytics are the life blood of the business world, but they haven’t yet taken a strong hold in the energy industry. That’s where startups like Deep Imaging Technologies come in.

My friend Manfred Osthues and I developed the concept behind protel, including an early version of its GUI. When we showed our work to potential customers, every single hotel that saw our prototype wanted to know when the full PMS would be available. Since then, protel has maintained a steady set of core principles. But staying true to our vision has meant overhauling our software—sometimes radically—as the hospitality industry and its approach to technology have changed.

Volara – led by David Berger as its CEO and Founder – is building voice interfaces for leading hotel technologies, while providing hotels the software to manage conversations with their guests at scale.

In 2013, Luther Birdzell formed OAG Analytics to create an AI platform that enables oil and gas companies to use more of their data to help solve critical problems like well spacing. Today, the OAG-Amazon SageMaker integration enables customers to unify their datasets and create proprietary analyses using virtually unlimited compute.