He builds chips that smell the things you can't - and sells the oil and gas industry something rarer than data: confidence, measured in parts per million.
Methane is invisible, odorless, and roughly eighty times more warming than carbon dioxide over its first two decades in the atmosphere. Ian Rogoff runs the company that found a way to put a number on it - cheaply, continuously, on a chip the size of a postage stamp.
NevadaNano, the company Rogoff leads as CEO from Sparks, Nevada, builds semiconductor gas sensors and the IoT systems that wrap around them. The core of it is a proprietary MPS sensor - one chip that can detect methane, hydrogen, flammable gas, and refrigerant leaks. Bolt a SaaS analytics layer on top and the combination, the company says, can cut emissions by as much as 99%.
The flagship is MethaneTrack, an automated emissions-monitoring platform aimed squarely at the oil and gas industry's most expensive headache: leak detection and repair, known in the trade as LDAR. Traditional LDAR means crews, trucks, and handheld sniffers walking a site on a schedule. MethaneTrack is meant to run maintenance-free for years and never blink.
That pitch landed. In February 2023 NevadaNano closed a $30 million Series C, drawing first-time checks from Honeywell Ventures and Emerson Ventures - two industrial giants with their own reasons to care about gas detection. By 2026, MethaneTrack had been named Best Industrial and IIoT Solution at Sensors Converge.
Rogoff's framing is consistent and unsentimental. The product isn't a gadget; it's compliance made simpler, faster, and cheaper. In a sector where Net Zero is more often a slogan than an audit trail, he is selling the audit trail.
NevadaNano is helping operators worldwide reduce the cost of emissions detection and remediation, and accelerate their progress toward Net Zero.- Ian Rogoff, CEO, NevadaNano
Before he was chasing molecules, Rogoff was Vice President of Microsoft Consulting Services - a corporate altitude most people are happy to retire from. Earlier, he held positions at Digital.com and Optimum Software. The arc from enterprise software to deep-tech hardware is not the obvious one. Software scales by copying. Sensors scale by surviving the field.
The bridge between those worlds is investing. Rogoff co-founded Sierra Nevada Partners, an investment firm built around a narrow thesis: buy and grow sustainable businesses and assets in the Western US. It is a regional, patient, build-it-to-last kind of capital, and it tells you where his attention drifted once he had the freedom to choose.
He kept one foot in policy. Rogoff chairs the board of New Energy Nexus, the nonprofit better known as the California Clean Energy Fund, which backs clean-energy entrepreneurs. He served on Nevada Governor Sandoval's Energy Task Force and has been appointed to federal and state-level economic development and energy committees - the unglamorous rooms where the rules that govern emissions actually get written.
It's a useful vantage point for a man who sells emissions monitoring. He has watched the regulation arrive from the inside, then built the hardware to satisfy it. The policy and the product reinforce each other.
Engineering teaches you how things break. Liberal arts teaches you why people care. Rogoff went and got both.
Automated, continuous methane emissions monitoring built to cut LDAR costs and meet EPA standards. Submitted to the US EPA Advanced Test Method program and validated in independent third-party field trials.
One semiconductor sensor that detects methane, hydrogen, flammable gas, and refrigerant emissions. Built to run maintenance-free for years in the field.
Sibling products extending continuous monitoring to greenhouse gases and refrigerant leaks across HVAC, energy, and industrial operations.
NevadaNano achieved SOC 2 Type 1 compliance - the kind of unglamorous credential that lets large corporations actually deploy your software.
The 2023 Series C drew first-time investments from two industrial heavyweights whose own businesses run on detection and control.
MethaneTrack took Best Industrial and IIoT Solution - validation from the industry that judges sensors for a living.
This investment allows us to ramp production and scale our newest offering, MethaneTrack, to meet the demand for low cost, continuous detection and quantification of methane emissions.
MethaneTrack gives the industry the confidence it needs to meet rigorous EPA standards today while preparing for the next generation of methane reduction commitments.
Our mission is to empower operators with technology that makes compliance simpler, faster, and more reliable.
The results confirm that our system not only meets the stringent requirements of the oil and gas industry but also outperforms other monitoring technologies.