2024 MIT R&D Conference: Startup Exchange Lightning Talks - Wellsite Navigator

JOSH ADLER: Good morning. I'm Josh Adler. I'm the founding CEO of Wellsite Navigator, and a Sloan fellow graduate class of 2013. What we do is provide a platform for safe and efficient off-road field work navigation. Imagine that you're driving a 4,000 gallon fuel truck in West Texas to deliver that fuel to a worksite on a 50,000 acre private ranch. You drive off of the blacktop county road through a gate onto a maze of dirt and gravel roads. Those dirt and gravel roads are eroded. They're uneven. They're very narrow for a giant fuel truck. They're pitted with mud puddles.

And the only directions that you have are handwritten notes from your dispatcher in the office. You've never been there before. These roads are not in Google Maps. They're not on any map. There's no street signs. You're pretty much making a guesstimate of which way you need to go. You pick one of these narrow dirt roads, drive for a few miles, and you get stuck in a ditch. You climb out of the truck to figure out why you're stuck. You're inspecting the truck. Your leg gets caught, the truck rolls over on you and you're dead.

That really happened two years ago for a contractor working for a super major in Texas. In fact, some version of that happens every three days in the United States, just in upstream oil field work. Not to mention all the other natural resource industries out there in other kinds of field work. According to the CDC, vehicle incidents are the leading cause-- the majority cause of work force fatalities in energy work in the United States. Over 100 per year. That's just in oil field. That is just in the United States. And what's the reason for most of that?

It's because the workers in the field don't have accurate, real-time driving directions for where they can go safely and efficiently on authorized routes. Also, field work logistics are one of the biggest wastes of money for companies that do field work. In particular, we found that the average field worker spends about 30 minutes per day lost on dirt roads. It's pretty easy math to find that cost their employers over $10,000 per worker per year just in wasted labor, fuel, and maintenance cost.

And that's not to mention the cost to the organization for the loss of productivity, for needless emissions, and for the risk and liability costs associated with people getting injured or doing damage to property. What if you could solve all that by having a system that allows your company to create the most efficient, safe, and authorized routes from the office or the field as real-time navigational directions for that entire workforce, including the contractors? That's what we do. Wellsite Navigator ensures that your field workforce is always safe and never lost. In fact, we are already the most widely installed and used software in the US oil and gas industry, with over 500,000 individual installations at more than 2,000 companies since we started doing this in 2012.

So what we do is we enable that safe and efficient field work direction by allowing companies to create and optimize custom routes, locations, worksites, and the individual jobs people are supposed to do. Convey them as real time navigation. And also at the same time, gather real time information from the field and share that throughout the workforce as a central geospatial knowledge database. This is a bit what that looks like. This is a real product being used by thousands of companies today.

And then you can also generate analytics and understand who is actually following the directions, who isn't, who is performing effectively in their job, and who should be reconsidered. As I mentioned, we're already in a very large portion of the US oilfield industry today and upstream. And really, what we're hoping to do working with MIT ILP partners and what we're here today for is we see an opportunity to expand beyond oil and gas to other natural resource industries, renewables, power, infrastructure and maintenance, even construction.

And we also are eager to start meeting companies that have operations in other countries. As today, we're entirely US and Canada. And so please come and talk to us out in the hallway after the presentation today. I'll be here all day, and I look forward to meeting you. Thank you very much.

[APPLAUSE]

SPEAKER: Thank you, Josh.