Darcy Partners is looking for the next innovation in the energy industry— and the one after that, and the one after that.

The company, an innovation advisory to the energy industry, began its work about 10 years ago with the idea of matching startups with more established companies in the oil and gas industry, Ron Sasaki, Darcy vice president, told Hart Energy.

Darcy’s research team scouts the startup landscape and makes recommendations to the member companies.

“Our members are oil and gas companies, small, large, mid-size, super majors, national oil companies, power utilities, industrials and investors,” Sasaki said. “They’re looking for technologies to deploy.”

Darcy’s research team helps examine the startups and showcases their tech to its members— more than 100— with all available information.

“We typically meet with all of our members once a month,” he said. “We have a whole member experience team that is engaged with their innovation group. We get to know them pretty well, and that’s how we’re able to surface different technologies that meet their bespoke needs.”

The searching takes place through old-fashioned networking, attending conferences, studying where investments are going or chatting with members, Sasaki said.

“They’re the ones that typically get approached by the [startups] first,” he said. “So we’re able to look at technologies across the world. We’ve got people in Australia, the Middle East, Europe, South America and North America.”

Darcy now gets recommendations from former startups.

“We’ll often get a ping from a company that we showcased a couple of years back saying we should check out this new startup,” Sasaki said. “They have something in AI, or they came up with a new drill bit.”

Then the due diligence begins. Darcy interviews the company and the product’s users.

“We really want to understand the mechanics behind it, the physics, the logic, the software,” Sasaki said. “Our sweet spot for technology is that it has to have a pilot or some commercial deployment. Our members typically want to see at least a pilot, a couple of trials, and know that it’s got some traction.”

Once members have shown interest in a startup that has been showcased, Darcy is a neutral third party, helping make connections without favoring any member over another.

Right now the members are looking for anything that improves reliability or saves money, Sasaki said. On the drilling side, he’s excited about a Houston-based startup called Cool Edge Bits.

Cool Edge Bits is run by a son-and-father team, Vasili and Anatoli Borissov. Vasili is the CEO, Anatoli the CTO and a rocket scientist.

“He looked at the drill bit and was looking at the jetting nozzle and thought it was really inefficient,” Sasaki said.

With the help of rocket science, Cool Edge Bits is “seeing the drill bit get 30% to 45% more efficient cooling,” which improves the life and performance of the bit.

Sasaki is also high on Automated Rig Technologies, a Canadian maker of rod and tubing rigs with a technology that helps reduce rod replacement failures.

Oil and gas companies are catching up with other industries when it comes to innovating, Sasaki said, especially when it comes to artificial intelligence. He said most companies have used AI in at least some applications.

“If you look at generative AI, the tech industries are obviously front and center, maybe medical and some other industries are on a little faster [track],” he said. “But oil and gas, at least your leaders aren’t too far behind.”

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