oil-and-gas
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Vicki Knott
Vicki Knott is the CEO and co-founder of CruxOCM, a Calgary-based industrial autonomy software company building AI-powered automation for oil and gas control rooms. A chemical engineer (P.Eng.) who started on the plant floor and trained as a pipeline control room operator at TransCanada, she left in 2017 to co-found CruxOCM with Roger Shirt. Her company's RIPA (Robotic Industrial Process Automation) technology automates the manual, high-stakes work of pipeline operators, and raised a $17M Series A led by Microsoft's M12 venture fund in 2024.
Ory Zik
Ory Zik is the CEO of Qnergy, an Ogden, Utah company that builds maintenance-free Stirling-engine generators used to convert stranded methane at oil, gas, landfill and livestock sites into electricity. A physicist by training with a Ph.D. from the Weizmann Institute, he has spent two decades founding cleantech and scientific-instrument companies, including Heliofocus (concentrated solar), Energy Points (environmental analytics, acquired by Lux Research) and Quantomix (live-cell electron microscopy). He also helped launch Greenpeace's Israel branch and served as scientific director of Israel's National Museum of Science.
Sriram Vasantharajan
Sriram Vasantharajan is the President and CEO of Mazama Energy, a Khosla Ventures and Gates Frontier-backed startup drilling into Oregon's Newberry Volcano to prove that superhot rock geothermal can deliver round-the-clock, carbon-free power at fossil-fuel prices. A former ExxonMobil engineer and CEO of oilfield services firm Blade Energy Partners, he is now applying decades of drilling and well-stimulation know-how from the oil patch to the geothermal industry, chasing rock hot enough to make a volcano's flank into a power plant.
Carlos Araque
Carlos Araque is the co-founder, president and CEO of Quaise Energy, a Houston- and Cambridge-based startup trying to drill the deepest holes in human history to tap superhot geothermal heat. A Medellin-born mechanical engineer with two MIT degrees, he spent 15 years at oilfield-services giant Schlumberger, then ran technology at MIT's venture platform The Engine, where he met the plasma physicist whose millimeter-wave drilling idea became Quaise. His pitch: vaporize rock instead of grinding it, reach depths where water turns supercritical, and use the resulting heat to run the same turbines and power plants fossil fuels use today.
Aditya Singh
Aditya Singh is the founder and CEO of Promethean Energy, a Houston-based oil and gas operator that develops, produces, and decommissions mid- to late-life assets in the Gulf of Mexico. An MIT-trained strategist who came up through process engineering and completions, Singh built Promethean around an unfashionable idea: that the most responsible thing you can do with an old well is plug it well. The company operates 10 Gulf leases, retires orphaned wells ahead of budget, and partners with the University of Houston on ROICE, a program to repurpose dead offshore platforms for wind, hydrogen, and carbon capture.
Michael Alexander
Michael Alexander is the co-founder and CEO of Addis Energy, a Somerville, Massachusetts startup turning the Earth's crust into a chemical reactor to make clean ammonia. A chemical engineer who spent more than eight years refining oil at Shell and Marathon Petroleum, he discovered geologic hydrogen at Harvard Business School and teamed up with classmate Charlie Mitchell and MIT professors Iwnetim Abate and Yet-Ming Chiang to commercialize a process that stimulates ammonia production from iron-rich rock underground. In December 2025 Addis raised an oversubscribed $8.3M seed round, bringing total funding to $17.3M.
Diego Villegas
Diego Villegas is the co-founder and CEO of Slang, an MIT-born edtech startup that uses machine learning and NLP to teach industry-specific professional English to the global workforce. A serial entrepreneur, he first built MASA, a Colombian oil-and-gas technical-services firm that grew to roughly $200M in revenue and 5,000+ employees before its acquisition by Stork. The pain of watching capable employees stall - and get laid off - for lack of business English became the seed of Slang, which now offers 150+ career-focused courses to companies including Nestle, Banco Santander, and Hyatt across more than a dozen countries.
Mark Ranalli
Mark Ranalli is the founder, president and CEO of BioSqueeze Inc., a Butte, Montana company that uses biomineralization - natural soil bacteria that grow limestone - to seal microscopic leaks in oil and gas wells and stop fugitive methane. A serial entrepreneur who previously built and led companies in publishing and telecommunications with workforces topping 700, he holds an electrical engineering and computer science degree from Stanford and an MBA from Dartmouth's Tuck School, and has served as a business-school dean. After scaling consumer-internet ventures, he turned to the unglamorous, high-stakes problem of leaky wellbores, backing a decade of Department of Energy and Montana State University research with a $7.4 million Series A.
Simon Jones
Simon Jones is the founder and CEO of Fluid Efficiency, a Caltech spin-out commercializing 'megasupramolecules' (MSMs), self-assembling polymers that make fuels harder to ignite in a crash and oil cheaper to push through a pipeline. An Oxford-trained inorganic chemist who spent years at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Jones is the industrial chemist who took a decades-old academic dream of safer jet fuel and figured out how to actually manufacture it at scale. He has collaborated with the original Caltech research team behind the technology since 2008.
William Foiles
William Foiles is the co-founder and CEO of Project Canary, a Denver climate-tech company that builds high-fidelity sensors and an enterprise data platform to measure, verify, and report methane emissions across the oil and gas value chain. A CFA charterholder with finance roots at Goldman Sachs and a stack of Stanford degrees, Foiles bet that the fastest way to fight climate change was not protest but precision - measuring the invisible 25% of warming that comes from methane so operators can actually fix it.
Dan Wright
Dan Wright is the Co-Founder and CEO of Armada, a San Francisco-based edge computing company building ruggedized, modular AI data centers deployable anywhere in the world - from oil rigs to military forward operating bases. Before Armada, he led DataRobot as CEO during its hypergrowth phase (peak valuation $6.3B) and was COO and General Counsel at AppDynamics through its landmark $3.7B acquisition by Cisco. A lawyer-turned-operator, Wright co-founded Armada in December 2022 alongside Jon Runyan, raised a $230M Series B at a $2B valuation in May 2026, and has deployed edge AI infrastructure across 43 countries for customers including the U.S. Navy and Aker BP.