The Denver crew that buys land nobody wants, drills it, and sells the whole thing for a billion

There is a version of the oil business that has nothing to do with wildcatting and everything to do with patience. You find the acreage that bigger operators walked past. You buy it quietly, one parcel at a time. You stitch the pieces into something you can actually drill, you drill it, and then - at a moment you have spent years waiting for - you sell the whole thing and hand the check to your investors. That is the business Avant Natural Resources has been running out of a Denver office tower since 2019, and it has now run it well enough, twice, to raise a fund north of a billion dollars to do it a third time.

Avant was founded by Jacob Nagy and Skyler Gary, who share the Founder and Co-CEO title. Nagy came out of energy finance, a former partner at the investment bank Petrie Partners and an Oil & Gas Investor "Forty Under 40" honoree. Gary came up on the land side, a petroleum landman with a decade of onshore experience before Avant. The pairing is the whole point: one side knows how to find and lock up the dirt, the other knows how to fund it and time the exit.

A repeatable formula, not a lucky strike

Most private energy shops raise a giant pool from a single private-equity sponsor and then spend years trying to spend it. Avant went the other way. Its early capital came from roughly eight investor groups - family offices, multifamily offices, and institutions - a base small enough that the founders kept the freedom to change their minds. That flexibility turned out to be the strategy. When one part of the market cooled, Avant could pivot to another without asking a sponsor for permission.

The industry has a name for this: the aggregator. Instead of bidding in the marketed auctions that everyone fights over, Avant runs what the founders call a "ground game" - sourcing small, scattered tracts through relationships and creative deal structuring, then assembling them into a position big enough to develop. The trick is that you do not need a lot of land to make it work.

Buying when everyone else can't

Avant's real skill is calendar-reading. The firm launched into the uncertainty of 2018-2019, then leaned into the disruptions that followed. When COVID dried up capital in 2020, Avant was well-funded enough to aggregate mineral rights and royalties in the Midland Basin - the exact moment most buyers had disappeared. When regulatory questions in the Delaware Basin spooked larger operators, Avant deployed capital there and let strong well results make the case.

That contrarian timing produced the first exit. In 2022, Avant sold its Midland Basin minerals-and-royalty package to Brigham for $132 million. It was proof the model worked - and, in hindsight, a warm-up.

The $1.45 billion sale that made the name

The second act was the one people noticed. Avant had spent roughly two years building an operated Delaware Basin position in New Mexico - drilling horizontal wells, standing up water recycling and gas infrastructure, turning acreage into an actual producing business. The original plan was modest: about 4,000 acres over five years. Avant executed closer to 17,000 acres in two.

In early 2025, Coterra Energy bought it. Avant's operated upstream and infrastructure assets went over in an all-cash deal valued at about $1.45 billion - part of a broader $3.95 billion Permian acquisition Coterra made alongside Franklin Mountain Energy. For a firm that had existed only since 2019, it was a defining trade.

A billion-dollar rerun

In July 2026, Avant closed Fund II - oversubscribed, at its hard cap, with more than $1 billion in equity commitments. The investor base widened beyond the early family offices to include pensions, foundations, and asset managers, with legacy backers rolling in alongside them. Kirkland & Ellis served as counsel. The fund already holds more than 40,000 net acres in New Mexico, production from 20-plus Avant-drilled horizontal wells, and exposure to natural gas and water infrastructure projects.

The instinct after two exits might be to reinvent - a new basin, a new asset class, a bigger swing. Avant is doing the opposite. The Fund II thesis is the same one from 2019: aggregate, operate, monetize. The founders describe themselves as agnostic about the endgame as long as it works for investors, which is a polite way of saying they will size and time each move to the market rather than to an ego.

Who actually buys from Avant

Avant has two kinds of customer, and neither is a person filling a gas tank. The first is its investors - the family offices, pensions, and foundations whose returns are the real product. The second is the strategic buyer at the end of the road: the Coterras and Brighams of the world, the mega-independents and royalty consolidators that would rather buy a clean, assembled, de-risked position than piece one together themselves. Avant does the hard, unglamorous assembly work and gets paid for handing over a finished thing.

That is also the difference from its competitors. Private-equity-backed E&P teams, legacy family operators, and mineral aggregators like Sitio and Brigham Minerals all chase Permian value too. Avant's edge is the off-market sourcing and a deliberately lean structure - a team of roughly 40 energy professionals, many of them veterans of EOG, Centennial, and Permian operators, run without a single institutional owner calling the shots.

Where Avant sits in the market is easy to describe and hard to copy. It is the connective tissue in the Permian's long consolidation wave - small enough to find the granular deals the giants miss, disciplined enough to develop them properly, and patient enough to sell at the top instead of the middle. The tagline the company gives itself, "At The Forefront of Energy Asset Management," is corporate. The plainer version is the one that keeps working: buy the pieces nobody bothered with, make them worth something, and time the door.