Thursday 23 August 2018

Equinor announced the inaugural class of global start-up companies selected to participate in the Techstars Energy Accelerator.

The ten start-up companies have been selected from hundreds of applicants across 38 countries. They will seek to accelerate their development through an intensive 13-week program, tapping into a global network of experts from Equinor and Techstars as well as the partnering companies KONGSBERG and McKinsey & Company.

The selected companies represent solutions within oil and gas, new business models, digitalisation and renewables. At the end of the program in December, they will present their solutions to Equinor, the partners and other potential investors at a Demo Day.

The accelerator is hosted at Equinor’s Oslo offices with access to Norway’s world-class energy-technology industry. Norway is the 8th largest exporter of oil, the 3rd largest exporter of gas in the world, and Norway itself is run on 97% renewable energy sources.

About the 10 companies

1. Ampaire, USA. Ampaire is making flying accessible to more people from more airports by building electric aircraft that are greener, quieter, and less costly to operate.

2. Crux OCM, Canada. Crux OCM utilizes AI and real-time optimization to enable semi-autonomous operation of pipelines, reducing the risk of operation and increasing volumetric throughput up to 4%.

3. DeepStream, UK. The tech enabled tendering and supplier pre-qualification platform for oil & gas businesses.

4. Interface Fluidics, Canada. Interface Fluidics' proprietary nanofluidic platform provides rapid lab testing that empowers the energy industry to understand how their chemicals perform, 100x faster and with more detail.

5. Opus 12, USA. Converting CO2 into fuel and valuable products, the technology will contain the CO2 converting power of 37.000 trees in the volume of a suitcase.

6. RatedPower, Spain. RatedPower provides pvDesign, a cloud-based software to design large-scale solar power plants worldwide, in just a few minutes.

7. SafeEx, Denmark. SafeEx's software digitizes inspection and maintenance and saves their customers 25-40% on manpower.

8. Sensytec, USA. Sensytec is developing a smart cement technology based on a proprietary additive to help companies enhance cement integrity by monitoring cement conditions near real-time.

9. Versor, Norway. Versor makes drone autonomy software for end-to-end infrastructure inspections, enabling AI-driven data capture and automatic fault detection across industrial applications.

10. Voyager, USA. Voyager is a cloud-based data hub helping the commodity shipping industry enhance decision making, automate processes and connect systems.

About Techstars Energy Accelerator in partnership with Equinor

- Ten companies selected in every programme from hundreds of applicants globally

- Successful applicants are typically teams from 2-20+; range from pre-product/pre-revenue to $millions in revenue; pre-seed, seed or series A+

- Accepted companies receive up to USD 120,000, the full programme and access to the Techstars and partner networks

- Teams aim to compress two years of work into 13 weeks

- To learn more visit www.techstars.equinor.com