energy
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Alliance Resource Partners is buying its next act
Coal still pays the bills. A $206.2 million royalty deal, a mining technology business, and one troubled mine show how Alliance is trying to make those bills less dependent on coal.
Energen: The art of letting go
Energen sold its gas utility, concentrated on the Permian Basin, and improved its wells. Then came a harder question: who should own them?
Phillips 66 bets on the journey.
The familiar gas-station sign conceals a sprawling business in pipes, processing and access. Its next chapter turns on where energy goes - and what it costs to get there.
CVR Energy built a way back.
A $179 million renewable diesel conversion seemed to offer a new use for an old refinery. CVR’s more revealing decision was keeping the option to reverse it.
Apache’s hardest job is pricing the next barrel
From a seven-barrel well to a multibillion-dollar offshore project, Apache’s history turns on a stubborn question: when does a discovery deserve another dollar?
Jacobs makes the future work underground
Before a city can grow or an AI factory can think, somebody has to solve the water, power and engineering. Jacobs has built a business around those inconvenient details.
The part with four names
HAL, Inc. makes software for the moment a shipment becomes somebody else’s problem. Its big idea: keep the identity of every little thing intact.
Workrise found its edge in the paperwork.
An oilfield marketplace became a $2.9 billion bet on skilled work. Now called RigUp again, Workrise is betting on the unglamorous business of getting energy projects staffed, supplied, and paid.
Cognite makes the factory readable
Before an AI can help run a plant, it needs to know which pump is which. Cognite built a business around that deceptively difficult task.
Hitachi Digital knows which valve to check.
Industrial AI has a homework problem: it needs to understand the machinery. Hitachi Digital brings the factory knowledge, the software teams, and a very large testing ground.
Gecko Robotics goes where the data isn't.
A wall-climbing robot makes a good entrance. Gecko Robotics’ bigger bet is that measuring the physical world can change how we repair it, finance it, and build it again.
MatchPlay Wants Your Second Investor Meeting to Start Further Ahead
A pitch deck opens a conversation. MatchPlay is building a business around what comes next: checked facts, useful introductions, and a clearer route to capital.
Dili found 1,393 problems hiding in the payroll
Fourteen solar projects, hundreds of payroll reports, and a compliance process that could collect the numbers without checking them. Dili sells a way to close that gap before the money is at risk.
PowerPlan and the second life of a power line
A utility can finish building long before its accountants finish the job. PowerPlan has built a business in that expensive interval, turning physical assets into financial records that tax teams and regulators can use.
Bodewell Group and the business of getting to yes
A water plant can work perfectly and still lose the public. Bodewell Group sells the patient, practical work between a sound proposal and a community willing to live with it.
Restrata Wants the Headcount Before the Headlines
A crisis is a bad time to discover that HR, travel and security have three different versions of where everyone is. Restrata is building a business around getting them to agree before the alarm sounds.
Riot Ventures Built a $1 Billion Firm by Betting on the Physical World
While venture capital chased frictionless software, Riot went looking for friction - factories, fleets, power systems and defense hardware. Its concentrated, multistage strategy now stretches from the first institutional check to pre-IPO rounds.
The Fund Betting That the Hard Problems Are Made of Atoms, Not Apps
A $66 million debut fund is putting first checks into space refueling, biometric firearms and board games - on the theory that the world's hardest problems are made of atoms, not apps.
The Denver crew that buys land nobody wants, drills it, and sells the whole thing for a billion
Founded in 2019, Avant runs one play over and over: aggregate the acreage bigger operators skip, turn it into producing wells, and monetize at the top of the cycle. Two exits and a billion-dollar fund later, the formula is holding.
The VC That Thinks Your Moonshot Has a Marketing Problem
Spacecadet writes $100K-$500K checks into frontier science, then hands founders a creative studio built to sell the impossible. Marc Andreessen and Chris Dixon are along for the ride.
The Bitcoin Miner That Decided It Was Really an Energy Company
MARA runs roughly 1.9 gigawatts of computing across four continents, holds more than 50,000 bitcoin, and now wants to sell you the cooling tanks and energy software behind it all.
The 9,000-Person Firm That Runs the Government's Least Glamorous Machinery
It started in 1969 as a fund for inner-city businesses. Today ICF models the power grid, rebuilds towns after storms, and quietly runs some of the federal programs you have never heard of.
The Company That Pumps One of Every Nine Barrels on Earth
It struck oil at a well called Dammam No. 7 in 1938. Nearly a century later, Aramco still moves roughly one of every nine barrels the world burns - and is quietly betting billions that its next act runs on gas, chemicals and code.
Maingen
Maingen is a Y Combinator (S26) startup building reinforcement learning environments for industrial operations - the roughly $5 trillion slice of the US economy that runs factories, power plants, and solar farms. Its first product, SolarBench, tests whether frontier AI agents can act as the on-call engineer for a portfolio of solar farms, handling alerts, telemetry, work orders, and priced field actions. The company sells the environments and datasets that let AI labs train and evaluate models on messy, long-horizon physical-world work.
Pylon
Pylon is a Cairo-based smart infrastructure platform that sells electricity and water utilities a subscription-based Smart Metering as a Service (SMaaS). Its software layers on top of any meter - old or new - to cut losses, improve revenue collection and give operators real-time visibility, all at zero upfront cost. Founded in 2017 and backed by Y Combinator (S21), Pylon runs across more than a million metering endpoints in Egypt and the Philippines.
Sytex
Sytex is an Argentine SaaS platform that digitizes and automates field infrastructure operations for telecom, energy, construction, and oil & gas teams. Companies use it to design workflows, run them in the field on a mobile app, verify evidence with AI, and turn every action into a single source of truth - replacing the Excel-and-email sprawl that slows down network rollouts and maintenance across nine-plus countries.
MyPass Global
MyPass Global is an Australian B2B SaaS company that runs a worker-owned digital Skills Passport and compliance platform for highly regulated, high-risk industries such as mining, oil and gas, energy and construction. Workers store verified qualifications, licences, medicals and background checks in one place and grant employers permission to view them, while site owners and contractors get real-time visibility of workforce compliance. Founded by Matt Smith and headquartered in Perth and Sydney, the platform serves more than 1,500 organisations and over 160,000 verified workers, and raised a A$7.5M Series A led by OneVentures in February 2025 to expand across the Americas.
Unleash live
Unleash live is a Sydney-based enterprise computer vision company that turns live video and imagery from drones, CCTV, IP cameras and mobile devices into real-time, actionable insights. Its cloud and edge platform runs a library of AI models to inspect critical infrastructure - power lines, wind turbines, solar farms, rail, roads and industrial sites - detecting faults, corrosion and equipment wear so utilities, transport authorities and resource companies can inspect assets faster and safer. Alongside the core platform it offers Autofly for automated drone and robot inspections and an AI App marketplace for building and deploying custom vision models.
NobleAI
NobleAI is a San Francisco software company that builds 'Science-Based AI' for chemical, materials and energy R&D. Its cloud VIP platform (Visualizations, Insights and Predictions) bakes physical laws and chemical properties into machine-learning models so they can make useful predictions from the sparse, messy datasets that industrial labs actually have - compressing R&D cycles from months to minutes. Founded in 2017 by physicist Matthew C. Levy, the company has raised roughly $40M from backers including Microsoft's M12, Chevron Technology Ventures, Sway Ventures and Dorilton, and counts chemical giants such as Solvay among its early partners.
InnovationForce
InnovationForce is a Durham, North Carolina software company behind InnovationWorks, an AI-powered SaaS platform that helps organizations run structured innovation at scale. Founded by CEO Kim Getgen and Harvard Business School professor Dr. Linda Hill, the platform turns organizational documents into sharp problem statements, then matches those challenges against a library of thousands of peer-validated solutions - claiming teams reach decisions roughly 85% faster and complete pilots far sooner. It has become especially well known in the energy and utilities sector, and was named to Fast Company's Top 10 Most Innovative Workplace Solutions of 2024 and Inc.'s Best in Business 2024.