Vicki Knott

The operator who taught pipelines to run themselves

Vicki Knott did not start in a boardroom or a research lab. She started on the floor of a pulp and paper mill, watching how heavy machinery actually behaves before anyone asked her to improve it. That instinct - understand the work first, engineer second - has followed her through every job since, and it is the reason CruxOCM, the company she co-founded, is now one of the more closely watched names in industrial automation.

Knott is a chemical engineer by training, with a Bachelor of Science from the University of New Brunswick and a P.Eng. designation. But the part of her resume that matters most is the part most software founders never have: she sat in the chair. Before starting CruxOCM, she worked at TransCanada Pipelines in commercial operations, in process control engineering, and finally as a trained control room operator - the person on shift, watching the screens, making the calls that keep crude and gas moving safely across thousands of kilometers of pipe.

That control room is where the whole idea began. It is also where she met Roger Shirt, a fellow engineer who would become her co-founder. What she saw on the job unsettled her: the methods were rigid, largely manual, and in many cases decades old. Operators were carrying enormous cognitive load, executing long sequences of steps by hand, in an environment where a mistake is not a bug report - it is a spill, a shutdown, or worse.

In 2017 she left TransCanada. In 2018 she and Shirt formally launched CruxOCM, and that same year the company was selected - one of only a handful worldwide - for the Techstars Energy accelerator in Oslo, Norway. Knott still talks about those three months as a core memory. After demo day, when the season's first snow fell over the city, the cohort ended up in a snowball fight. The network she built there, she says, was the single biggest takeaway - mentors who became angel investors and, later, connectors to venture capital.

What CruxOCM actually builds

The company's core technology is trademarked RIPA - Robotic Industrial Process Automation. The simplest way to describe it: an autopilot for the industrial control room. Rather than replacing operators, RIPA takes the repetitive, high-stakes procedural load off their hands, automating start-ups, optimizations, and routine sequences while keeping the human in command. Applied to oil pipeline gathering systems, CruxOCM reports a reduction in control room operator workload of up to 99 percent.

The product line reads like a roster of purpose-built robots: pipeBOT arrived in 2020, followed by leanOPT and maxOPT in 2021, then gatherBOT, draBOT and powerOPT. Each targets a specific slice of midstream operations - the pipelines, gathering systems and facilities that move energy between where it is produced and where it is used. It is a market measured in the tens of billions of dollars, and one that has been slow to modernize.

Selling autonomy to an industry where failure is not an option

Convincing Fortune 500 pipeline operators to hand critical procedures to a startup's software is not a soft sell. Knott has said that a founder has to genuinely believe in the value on offer, because if they don't, neither customers nor investors will. That conviction paid off with the company's first multi-year, eight-figure contract - a deal she celebrated by taking the whole team to Mexico. CruxOCM describes itself, plainly, as building "AI-powered automation for industrial environments where failure is not an option."

The recognition has followed. CruxOCM was named Startup of the Year at Edge Computing World in 2022, won a Silver Stevie Award for Energy Industry Innovation in 2023, and picked up an ASTech Award for AI/ML advancement in 2024. That same year it closed a $17 million Series A led by M12, Microsoft's venture fund - a strong signal that the software-defined control room is being taken seriously well beyond the oil patch.

That line captures how Knott thinks about leadership. She talks about self-awareness as the foundation of good entrepreneurship and describes it, half-seriously, as a personality type - one built on grit and resilience. The most dangerous person on a team, in her telling, is the one who is confident about a skill they don't actually have. She builds against that blind spot deliberately.

The 15 percent

Knott is candid about the world she came up in. The pipeline control room is a heavily male-dominated environment - roughly 15 percent of that workforce is women. She has used her visibility as a founder to push for more diversity in oil and gas, and to reframe what the industry can be: not a relic to be dismantled, but existing infrastructure that can be made dramatically more efficient and lower-emission with better software. Her aspiration is a practical one - safer operations, higher throughput, fewer wasted resources on assets the world still depends on.

There is a through-line in all of it. The mill floor, the operator's chair, the snowball fight in Oslo, the offsite in Mexico - Knott's company slogan, "built by operators, for operators," is not marketing. It is autobiography. She built the thing she wished she'd had when she was the one watching the screens.

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