An oil deal arrives in public as a number. Before that, it exists as a collection of rights, agreements and decisions about where a well might go. Skyler Gary’s career began in that less photogenic part of the business. Petroleum land work puts a person close to the details that a transaction announcement eventually compresses into a few lines. The drilling rig gets the silhouette. The lease has to settle for a signature.
Gary is a founder and co-CEO of Avant Natural Resources, the Denver investment firm he established with Jacob Nagy in 2019. Its history includes a Midland Basin royalty transaction announced at approximately $132.5 million in 2022 and a Delaware Basin asset sale announced at $1.45 billion before adjustments. Those are company transactions, with specific assets and investors behind them. They also mark the distance Gary has travelled professionally.
To understand that distance, begin with the job title he held before the executive one: landman. It supplies a useful opening to his story, starting with the work that preceded the latest fund.
The work before the well
A petroleum landman works where an energy company meets the people and agreements that determine its access to minerals. The profession involves negotiating leases, researching ownership and managing the rights that development requires. A promising formation underground does not resolve those questions above it. Someone has to establish what the company can actually do.
That makes land work a concrete education in the difference between an attractive idea and an executable business. Ownership, contractual obligations and operating plans must fit together. A map can suggest a possibility; an agreement defines the permission. For a founder moving from this profession into investing, the relationship between the asset and its terms is already familiar territory.
Gary’s earlier experience included Sequel Energy, a private equity-backed operator focused on the Bakken Shale. Later, at Denver-based Hat Creek Energy, he served as director of land and business development. Hat Creek held operated and non-operated assets across several states. His responsibilities before Avant included leasing programs and drilling operations, putting his career across both the assembly of rights and their practical use.
The progression matters because “land” can sound like a narrowly administrative specialty. In oil and gas, the work connects ownership with the decisions an operator must make. Gary reached the founder’s desk having already worked along that connection.
Two routes into the same company
Gary earned his bachelor’s degree at the University of San Diego. He attended from 2006 to 2010 and participated on the lacrosse team. It is a small detail beside the transaction figures, but a reminder that a career has a life before its corporate biography begins counting years of experience.
His listed professional courses cover basic petroleum geology, horizontal well completion and stimulation, and economic evaluation and investment decision methods. Together, the subjects describe the range of questions that surround an oil and gas investment: what is underground, how a well is completed and how a proposed project is evaluated. They belong beside a career that moved through leasing and development into a company responsible for raising and deploying investment capital. The subjects give a reader a clearer sense of the work inside the broad label of energy experience.
His co-founder arrived by a different route. Nagy had been a partner and managing director at Petrie Partners, an energy investment bank. Gary’s land background and Nagy’s finance background give the partnership two distinct professional histories. They share the founder and co-CEO titles.
The pairing makes sense in the business they chose. Finding an investment requires judgments about the underlying asset and the money available to support it. Neither judgment replaces the other. An operating opportunity must survive the financial questions; a financial proposal needs an asset that can perform the work expected of it.
Avant’s founding in 2019 put those questions inside one firm. Its subsequent transactions provide a way to follow what happened next. The evidence is in the assets the firm assembled and the responsibilities it took on, giving this partnership’s different professional backgrounds a specific business setting.
A royalty package gets a price
The first major marker in that sequence involved mineral and royalty interests in the Midland Basin. In 2022, Brigham Minerals announced an agreement to buy interests from royalty funds managed by Avant and its affiliates for approximately $132.5 million in cash, subject to closing adjustments.
The package covered roughly 3,900 net royalty acres in Martin and Midland counties. It included interests in acreage developed by Endeavor Energy Resources, Pioneer Natural Resources and ExxonMobil. The buyer was acquiring a position tied to activity by established operators.
For a reader outside oil and gas, the distinction is useful. Buying a royalty interest and taking responsibility for operating a well represent different kinds of involvement. Royalty ownership concerns an entitlement associated with production. Operating rights authorize drilling and related activity. The two can sit close together geographically while placing their owners in different positions commercially.
The Brigham transaction therefore describes a particular phase of Avant’s business. It shows an assembled royalty position finding a buyer. Calling every oil transaction simply an acreage sale would erase precisely the distinction that makes the next phase of Gary’s career interesting.
Announced cash consideration for Brigham Minerals’ acquisition of Avant-managed mineral and royalty interests, before closing adjustments.
Taking on the operating business
Avant’s later Delaware Basin transaction involved upstream and infrastructure assets. The scope had changed. In November 2024, Coterra agreed to purchase certain assets from Avant affiliates for $1.45 billion in cash, subject to adjustments. The sale closed in January 2025.
The terms deserve their own space. Coterra also acquired assets associated with Franklin Mountain Energy in a separate transaction. The combined announcement carried a larger total. Gary’s Avant story belongs to the Avant asset package within those transactions. Keeping the figures attached to the assets makes the business easier to follow.
There is an equally useful distinction between selling assets and selling the continuing firm. Avant carried on after the transaction. Its founders could pursue another investment program because the sale transferred a portfolio while leaving a business capable of pursuing the next one.
That is the recurring action in Gary’s professional story: assemble an investment, develop its place in a portfolio, complete a transaction, then face another set of decisions. The completed sale gives that process a visible endpoint. The next investment removes any temptation to treat the endpoint as permanent.
- Minerals & royaltiesMidland Basin interests sold in 2022
- Upstream & infrastructureDelaware Basin assets sold in 2025
- Another investment programFund II close announced in July 2026
The geography rewards attention
The Permian Basin supplies the setting for these decisions. Its Midland and Delaware basins feature stacked reservoirs developed with horizontal drilling. Longer horizontal well segments and multi-well pad drilling have helped operators change the productivity and economics of development.
That technical context gives land assembly a practical consequence. Acreage has a shape, rights have boundaries and a drilling plan has requirements. Putting interests together is connected to what an operator intends to build. The map and the well design have to be considered in the same conversation.
Infrastructure adds another layer. Avant describes water gathering and recycling infrastructure among its activities, alongside operated properties and royalty interests. A producing asset sits inside a network of supporting work. A portfolio can therefore contain more than the wells that attract the most attention.
This is the business context in which Gary’s experience becomes relevant. His earlier leasing and operating work precedes a firm whose investments span several parts of that system. His career links the decisions about access to land with the work and capital needed to develop it.
Another fund, another set of decisions
On July 8, 2026, Avant announced the final close of Fund II and related vehicles with more than $1 billion in equity commitments. The announcement described control of over 40,000 net acres in New Mexico and production from more than 20 Avant-drilled horizontal wells, alongside natural gas and water infrastructure investments.
Commitments describe money pledged to an investment program. They are a different measure from the consideration paid for an asset package. In Gary’s timeline, the distinction separates the sale already completed from the work that investors are agreeing to support next.
Gary has described aggregation as demanding work that requires a steady flow of opportunities and a willingness to keep going through uneven months. He credits the team around him with pushing the business forward. “There’ll be slow months and then there’ll be great months,” he said in 2025. That observation gives the milestones a more human rhythm. A completed transaction has a date. Building the position that makes it possible takes place across a succession of ordinary working days. His account puts colleagues and persistence alongside the capital in the explanation of how Avant developed.
His own description in July 2026 stayed close to assembly and execution:
“Our investors recognize our ability to assemble high-quality operated acreage on an efficient and consistent basis.”
Skyler Gary · July 2026
The statement places the emphasis on doing a particular job repeatedly. Avant also announced Gary’s selection for Hart Energy’s 40 Under 40 Class of 2026. The recognition gives him an individual milestone within a career whose public record is largely about collective work.
There is a certain suitability to that. Land professionals spend their time connecting interests that begin in different hands. Gary’s company now works across land, operations, infrastructure and capital. Each transaction brings a public number. His career keeps leading back to the pieces that had to fit before anyone could announce it.