The following interview is a conversation we had with Iain Cooper, CEO of SeekOps, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $23 Million Raised to Build the Future of Emissions Monitoring
Iain Cooper
Thanks very much. Looking forward to the conversation.
Brett
Yeah, no problem. So, before we begin talking about what you guys are building there, let’s start with a quick summary of who you are and a bit more about your background.
Iain Cooper
Sure. So I was raised in Scotland, hence the funny spelling of Ian. I stick the extra I in there just to confuse everybody. Moved to England when I was still young, hence no Scottish accent. Studied a lot of mathematics at school and ended up doing a PhD in meteorology of all things, which I’ve actually come full circle with emissions monitoring. Joined Schlumberger straight after the PhD and spent 30 years there doing a variety of technology development around drilling, fracking, and then for the last twelve years there founded and ran their venture capital group, which was certainly the best job in the oil patch for sure. Invested in a lot of interesting companies. Had a number of IPOs from that portfolio that they keep me abreast of, post my Schumbajet career and then looked at CCOPS and actually wanted to do an investment in CCOPS while I was at Sombraj.
Iain Cooper
But it took me leaving and joining CCOPS to get Sombre to invest in series B. Wow.
Brett
Amazing. And two questions we like to ask just to better understand what makes you tick as an executive. What CEO do you admire the most and what do you admire about them?
Iain Cooper
It’s an interesting one because it used to be Elon until it went a little off the rails, but I have to say it’s probably Patrick Puerne of Total. He’s put huge emphasis on the greening of the Total and now Total Energies company and really has been very forthright about the ambitions of the clean energy domain amongst the operators. And I think I’ve seen him really as a visionary and a leader from that side.
Brett
Nice. It’s refreshing to hear someone other than Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos so appreciate hearing someone new. And what about books? Is there a specific book that’s had a major impact on you as a leader? And this can be a business book or it can also be a personal book that just influenced how you view the world?
Iain Cooper
I have a fairly diverse reading habit. I don’t read business books. I actually find business books pretty dull. So I try and get my learning from a mix of literature and really enjoyed Morrissey the Singer’s biography. He’s very literate, he’s led a very flamboyant life and I tend to read a lot of biographies of musicians and movie makers. So I’m actually currently reading Quentin Tarantino’s book as well. And that one’s really highlighted how someone has been very focused on doing exactly what they wanted to do from a very early age, but also has this huge and voracious appetite for the media he works in as well. I see that as a very inspirational text.
Brett
Nice. I’ll have to check that out. Now let’s talk about SeekOps and what you guys have going on there. So to start with, could you just walk us through the origin story behind the company?
Iain Cooper
Sure. The company was founded by two people at NASA JPL in 2017, Andrew Aubreyam and Brendan Smith, and they were working on technology for the Mars Curiosity rover or the original center that worked on the Mars Curiosity rover. And they had the idea of saying how can we use this commercially back on planet Earth? And so they took that decided with their interest in unmanned aerial systems or drones to combine the two and developed a prototype sensor that received some early funding from Equinor for exploring the methane issues that people were starting to recognize in the oil field. With that funding, they took the company from Pasadena to Austin, which is where we are now, and set up the company. They worked closely with Stanford University on validating the technology, that independent validation of the technology being really important for them. Subsequently got funding from the Oil and Gas Climate Initiative climate investments group, which again enabled them to grow further and work on some of the offshore technology deployments using fixed wing drones with a company called Fly Logix out of the UK that does the long range flights from land to the offshore platforms and back about a 600 kilometer round trip.
Iain Cooper
I joined in 2020 and after 30 years with Schlumberger, primarily to help the company finish the commercialization the technology given my background in tech commercialization at Schlumberger, but also to help them raise a Series B to really help them start that scaling. And so between when I joined and now we’ve had a couple of world’s first, the world’s first biotechester survey as well as the first detailed landfill survey. So in addition to oil and gas, we’ve expanded into a couple of other regions as well. And then I think to draw a nice line under kind of phase one of the company, we are awarded Startup of the Year at Adipec, which is the big energy event in the Middle East towards the end of last year. And actually in the same week we also won Production Technology of the Year from the One Future Group, which is a consortium of midstream operators.
Iain Cooper
So a really nice way to draw that line under as we really look at scaling. And I’d say the most impactful thing for me was to see that were commercial on all six major continents by the end of the year.
Brett
Wow, that’s amazing. So one thing I want to double click on there is the fact that after 30 years you left this company and joined a somewhat early stage startup. So what’s the psychology like there? Were you a little bit nervous or scared making that change? Were you just ready to go at that point or what was that like?
Iain Cooper
It was mixed emotions. I was always very proud of the work I’d done at Slombage again the last twelve years I was running the venture capital group there. So I was sitting on the board of a lot of startups and seeing and certainly learning from good CEOs and management teams and bad CEOs and management teams how a good startup company should interface with his investors, work on commercial side of their investors and in the commercial world in general. Now I’d had 30 years in kind of the tech side of things so it wasn’t really truly operational focused. So having a good team around me that’s more operational focused and more business focused was probably something that I was more concerned about. The technology side I knew I could handle. I think the governance side, having sat on the boards I knew I could handle. It was more, I think my uncertainty on how do I direct business teams and certainly how do I direct field operations, having had limited experience in the field beforehand.
Iain Cooper
So having said that, with those apprehensions I was made very welcome very quickly and I think we’ve pulled together a very nice performant executive management team now that really understands, is truly collaborative and is all moving in the right direction.
Brett
Amazing. And to dive deeper into the product, what are the customers actually buying then? Are they buying the drones and then manning themselves or is this a service where you come in and deliver it for the customers?
Iain Cooper
So it is a service, although the key differentiators we have is the sensor that was spun out of NASA and has been ruggedized through the oil field operations by the team in Austin. We are typically contracted by an operator to fly a facility for them to determine again the emissions at kind of the asset level, that’s what my total emissions from that site and then perform more detailed surveys where we can identify which components on that site are actually leaking. And really our differentiation is we actually quantify the emissions so we can tell them the rate of emission so it enables them to one, roll up their emission statistics, whether they’re going to use it for ESG reporting or enable them to triage the repairs so they fix the big leaks first. We typically show up as well and perform an orthomosaic map. This is a high resolution image survey so that we can really put where those emissions we have found on that image and give them the context of the operation that was occurring at the time.
Iain Cooper
So again, really detailed feedback on the emissions and where they’re located and enable them to quantify. And again, this is important, and maybe we’ll talk a little bit later about regulatory pressures and the complexity of global regulations around emissions reporting.
Brett
Yeah, let’s dive deeper into the regulatory side.
Iain Cooper
So it’s definitely bifurcated between EPA drivers in the US. And what’s known as Oil and Gas Methane Partnership 2.0, a UN initiative really for Europe, but has started to be the world now, as they’ve added a number of signatories there’s about 80 plus signatories of companies to Ogmp Two. And that focuses on emissions, really from the wellhead to the gas pump and is mandating quantification. And there’s a various number of levels in Ogmp two. There’s a gold standard, level five, which fits very nicely to what we do because that’s all about quantification at the equipment group level. So we’ve actually helped a number of the larger operators achieve Ogmp Two gold standard with our technology. EPA is still deliberating what improvements they’re going to make to their regulations. We’re anticipating they will come out with statements before the end of this year. We feel this is certainly going to mandate, again, quantification, not just detection, which is the current regulatory requirement, is to perform a quarterly survey with an optical gas imaging camera, which of course, does not quantify.
Iain Cooper
It just detects and requires certainly someone skilled in the art on the ground to be able to direct those cameras. So we feel that the EPA is really about to turn over a new chapter with the acceptance of these new technologies, be it satellite, manned aircraft or unmanned systems, as well as some of the fixed sensors. Although I think they honestly have a little bit of trouble quantifying, given that they’re fixed and don’t necessarily see every part of the operation.
Brett
And can you expand on the status quo when it comes to detection? So you mentioned cameras there. What are these special cameras like? And then do they have to be flown with a helicopter or a small aircraft? What’s the status quo on the detection side?
Iain Cooper
So the current status is essentially a handheld camera. An operator will go up, a skilled operator, and as you can imagine, it’s somewhat subjective. They’re pointing these cameras that are looking at essentially the infrared signature of the plume. It gives you a color contrast or a black and white contrast on the camera. But I think that’s really motivated the driver behind these new technologies. And so you’ve got satellites now. So again, there’s a company, GHGSat out of Montreal that have been deploying sensors on satellites, looking at reflection from the sun and then looking at that path length between the satellite and the surface of the methane concentrations. There’s mad aircraft that fire lasers or LiDAR at specific facilities. Look at the scatter back, look at the signal back and use that. So again, there’s a range of technology out there now that are really trying to go above and beyond the existing status quo of those optical gas imaging cameras.
Iain Cooper
In fact, I think I remember walking into an Apple store, it must have been a few years ago when Apple was selling a whole range of other kind of ancillaries for their products. And you used to be able to have an add on for a flur infrared camera for an iPhone, I think. And that technology is very similar to what’s used today.
Brett
Got it. That’s fascinating. And how do you think about market categories? Is this a category creation play or is this really just chipping into some of those existing categories?
Iain Cooper
I think it’s a build on to an existing framework. The operators on the oil and gas side and certainly on the landfill side, have always had to report statistically their emissions. Typically this was done by emission factors, not by measurement. It was based on calculations or equipment understanding of the equipment they had in place. Again, with the plethora of new technologies that have been developed around this, I think it has created a new market. But it’s also, I think, been driving as just one part of the energy transition in the past net zero. It happens to be, I think, one of the most visible because it’s also, they say it’s the low hanging fruit that can be addressed because leaks can be fixed. So it has created a new market around emissions technology, emissions reporting. I think it’s been in parallel, driven by a number of different factors.
Iain Cooper
One has been certainly the focus on ESG reporting and the need for transparency, particularly, again, with the majors, super majors, but even with some of the private equity owners of assets in the US. That have essentially said what are we doing for ESG? I think things like the Inflation Reduction Act and the methane deduction program, that’s part of that is going to continue to drive this market. And then on the biogas and landfill side, it’s all really been about carbon credits. They need asset integrity and to keep product in pipe because the value of the gas to them from a carbon credit is really worth much more than the spot price of the gas itself. So again, there’s been some independent drivers that kind of somewhat serendipitously mesh to create this market.
Brett
Wow, that’s fascinating. And to give us an idea of the traction and growth you’re seeing, are there any numbers that you’re comfortable sharing?
Iain Cooper
We’re actually about to go out for a Series C raise now to scale. Following on from that fact that we are now commercial on six continents, we’ve trained at least two or more drone service companies in each of our key regions north America, Latin America, Asia Pacific and Middle East and Africa that enable us to scale. So we’re looking at primarily scaling that business. Of course, we’re going to be doing some continued differentiation, leveraging some of the beyond visual line of sight characteristics of these modern unmanned systems. So last year we tripled our revenue from the previous year. And that’s really all been about the transition from operators, trialing pilots, seeing how these technologies work from one or two jobs to I want to come and do 300 well pads or can you come back every quarter? And so that’s how we’re continuing to scale and grow.
Iain Cooper
We’re not cash flow positive yet, but that’s just around the corner. But that’s really where we’re positioning that seriously now is the scale. We’re just under 40 people. We don’t plan on adding a lot of heads because again, our business model really is to scale with those drone service providers as independent industrial drone companies that have already got significant flight approvals from operators or other industrial applications.
Brett
And does the oil and gas industry tend to be more open to new technologies like this? Or is selling a drone to oil and gas is that difficult to do?
Iain Cooper
I think I’m not giving away any secrets. Having had 30 years in Schlumberger that I think most operators like to be fast followers. No one really wants to be the first in a new market or test a new technology. Again. There’s a few operators out there that are certainly willing to take a few more risks. And as you might imagine, there’s a range of maturity of technology adoption within those operators and particularly those that have the fairly strong internal R and D groups. It tends to be a little easier for them to trial new technologies. So I think unmanned aerial systems took a while to get some traction, but now I think they’re almost ubiquitous. And there’s certainly some regions of the world that are a little more sensitive to the use of drones. But the fact you can walk into Best Buy and buy one now I think has certainly alleviated a lot of the concerns that drones would be used as policemen or watching over you.
Iain Cooper
And the fact that I think visual inspection has come on so fast, so quickly certainly has, I think, eased the conscience of the operators in accessing and making these technologies available to their assets. I think one of the things that we’ve also seen is groups like Amazon and Walmart really pushing the envelope with these technologies as well. Particularly for things like Last mile delivery and Beyond Visual line of sight, which is I think certainly something that when you talk to a couple of the large super majors, they don’t want to have anybody on well sites in the future. They want it to be completely automated and unmanned. And I think that’s certainly going to drive the continued growth of unmanned systems be it both airborne and submarine as well.
Brett
And how far out do you think that is before the sites are entirely autonomous?
Iain Cooper
I mean, you can see wells being drilled remotely from different parts of the world now, cementing jobs being done remotely. So the technology and the capabilities are there. I think a lot of it is the infrastructure around there, the It security, the latency that needs to be put around that to ensure the continuous safety of operations. And you’ve seen it in other industries. I think you’re quite comfortable getting on a driverless train these days. And I think it’s is it ten years away? Probably not. I thought we’d be on Mars already, but I think certainly on the progress we’ve seen recently, I would say 20 years from now, the production side of the future is going to be very different.
Brett
Super interesting and as I’m sure you experience on the corporate venture side. And then today with SeekOps, going to market, especially with innovative technology, isn’t easy to do. So what would you say has been your greatest challenge that you’ve faced so far and how did you overcome that challenge?
Iain Cooper
I would say there’s been two challenges and again, we’ve obviously talked to institutional as well as corporate venture groups. I would say certainly when I was wearing a corporate venture hat, were called the dumb money in the room, which I thought not was only insulting, but also did a disservice to, I think, the depth at which corporate venture groups really do their technical due diligence. I think there’s still quite a lot of bandwagon jumping and there’s a lot of misinformation, particularly in this space out there, that we’ve had to correct by looking at the science of emissions rather than the marketing of emissions. And so the biggest hurdle I’ve come is trying to get everyone on a kind of level set of these are the fundamental issues that you need to address when you’re looking at emissions. It’s not just about put a fixed sensor on a site, leave it and you’ll be able to detect and quantify everything.
Iain Cooper
That’s just not feasible. There’s no silver bullet when you’re addressing emissions. And so highlighting that there’s not just one technology here that’s going to meet the needs of not just the oil and gas industries, but energy industry in general has been the biggest issue that I’ve tried to get across to people. Is it’s going to require a combination of technologies and also operators and service companies working in harmony, harmonization of standards to really get there? And that’s quite a lot when you’re doing a pitch to an investor to get across before you’ve even got to the tech and the business plan.
Brett
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Now, last question here for you, Ian, before we wrap. If we zoom out into the future, what’s the, let’s say three year vision for the company?
Iain Cooper
Certainly to continue to build out this global presence. I think we certainly want to build where we actually have a prototype CO2 center that part of the use of proceeds for the series. C will go to commercialize. I always like to think of it that methane, because it’s the shorter lived molecule compared to CO2, kind of determines the rate of temperature rise for climate effects. The CO2 determines the magnitude. So both are important. Three years from now, we’d certainly want to have commercial operations for both CO2 and methane. Again, on that global basis, I think I’d love to point to the fact of just how much methane we’ve abated by identifying very early in real time the emissions from sites. So really making sites much cleaner, branching into certainly some other industries as well, like mining and power generation and leveraging our technology to help them, perhaps adding other species where unmanned aerial systems can really compete, and continuing to drive people out of the system.
Iain Cooper
I’ve called it. I want to automate from proposal to payment, so including everything, including the back office as well, and really automate that so when a customer comes with a request, everything, including the survey, the data analysis, and our payment is automated. Wow.
Brett
Super exciting. All right, Ian, we’re going to have to wrap here before we officially wrap, though. If people want to follow along with your journey as you continue to build, where’s the best place for them to go?
Iain Cooper
Www.ccops.com sdekps.com is the website and I can be reached. Iain Cooper@ccops.com that’s the easiest way to get hold of me. As with most startup CEOs, I’m check my mail all the time.
Brett
Awesome. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to chat and talk about what you’re building and share this vision. This is all super exciting and look forward to seeing you execute on this vision.
Iain Cooper
Thanks, Brett. Appreciate the time.
Brett
All right, keep in touch.
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