Pike Robotics designs and builds inspection robots that can go into explosive atmospheres and other hazardous environments to collect necessary data, vital to repair and maintenance work. Our beachhead market is inspection of oil and oil-refined product storage tanks with robots, making the entire process safer, less costly, and more accurate, which also helps to reduce a large source of greenhouse gas emissions.
Pike Robotics was spun out of UT's Nuclear and Applied Robotics Group and originally funded by Phillips 66 to help with the real need they have for maintaining their product storage and refining facilities. Improving the outdated inspection method for above-ground storage tanks was and continues to be the focus of the project. Failed seals inside storage tanks holding oil and oil-refined products lead to excessive VOC emissions and up to 5% of product lost to evaporation. Regular inspections are required by the EPA to ensure proper functionality. Today this involves sending human crews inside the tank, which is dangerous, costly to perform (avg of $700k in turnaround costs), and inaccurate. We have developed a robotic platform designed for explosive atmospheres and equipped with a state-of-the-art sensor suite, designed to replicate & improve upon traditional inspection methods without endangering human life or causing asset downtime. This system will be approved for flammable locations with its Class 1, Division 1 certification, allowing it to perform in-service tank inspections.
Our traction to date consists of - NSF Phase 1 SBIR Grant & Completion of National I-Corps Customer Discovery Program ($300k) - Sponsored research agreement ($350k) between Phillips 66 and UT Austin, resulting in LOS & MVP of robotic solution - 8 Tech Demonstrations for asset owners and service providers, resulting in over 10 Letters of Support - Exclusive Licensing Agreement w/ UT Austin for 2 pending patents around the design of the robot and its novel inspection methodology
Our team of engineers and scientists comes from the renowned Texas Robotics Lab (robotics.utexas.edu/research) and, more specifically, the Nuclear and Applied Robotics Lab (robotics.me.utexas.edu), a group formed at UT-Austin to develop and deploy advanced inspection robots for nuclear, energy, and DOD facilities. Partnerships with established players in the Oil & Gas space such as Phillips 66, Chevron, and Shell allow this group and Pike access to facilities for real-world testing, opportunity to integrate commercial-off-the-shelf and custom robots into their operations, and knowledge of industry standards. Access to the engineers at Phillips 66, who asked for this innovation in 2019, is a strong component of our success today in 2024. We've grown this team from professor, student, and research assistant to a team of 10 full-time / part-time engineers and advisors over the past year.
Our go-to-market strategy consists of 3 phases.
In the first phase, we will lease our inspection robot out to established service providers, who already have inspection contracts with energy companies. These service providers have told us that they have over a thousand tank inspection contracts that they could win if our robot was ready today.
In Phase 2, we will create a service division that will win our own service contracts. We will limit the number of robots we sell to other companies, so as not to compete with ourselves. We’ll start offering our storage tank inspection service to smaller, midstream and downstream storage terminals in the Gulf Coast. These facilities will be easier to win contracts at because they generally bid out each job instead of working with just one contractor. There are also fewer hurdles, such as site safety trainings and OSHA work incident history, to overcome to be allowed on-site. We will provide an at-cost inspection demo on a customer’s tank to compare results to the incumbent and prove our effectiveness. We've already identified another service provider to partner with, which will help us both win service contracts (typically 3 years in length). They can do the inspections on the underside of these floating roof tanks. We handle the upper side. This service provider is helping us get on-site at a number of facilities across the Houston area in the coming months.
In Phase 3, we will expand our service offering to target larger customers and refinery site types.
Revenue will be generated via 2 streams:
- Annual leases or per job rentals of the inspection robot system to existing service providers at energy facilities
- Inspections performed directly by Pike in consort with or separate from the service providers.
Pike Robotics is seeking to fill the rest of our $1M seed round round, extending our runway 18 months to June 2026. This summer we expect to receive $1.1M in non-dilutive grant money from the National Science Foundation SBIR Phase 2 program.
This novel robotics technology is poised to transform the way the energy companies perform inspections on their critical infrastructure. Pike is looking for corporate, VC, university, or angel investors to fill the rest of the round. Currently $170k of the round has been secured with another $250k committed.
This money will be devoted to team growth, an upgrade of facilities, manufacturing of more robots, and travel and setup costs for onboarding customers. This money will allow us to fully enter the market by Q3 2025 as an approved vendor to established service providers, who already perform work at these tank sites.
Pike has developed a wall-crawling inspection robot, designed for use in hazardous locations and explosive atmospheres. Its data collection capabilities include visual, LiDAR, gas concentration detection, and physical probing. All of the collected sensor data is fused together to generate a mechanical integrity inspection and environmental compliance report real-time. The current problem spots are displayed against previous year inspection results to help the operator predict time to tank failure and formulate an actionable repair plan. We have three robots in our inventory that have performed eight successful field tests today for a variety of energy companies, and we have several more demonstrations scheduled in 2025. We are currently going through certification testing with the robot before building out more units and distributing them to our early adopters (oilfield service providers). We will constantly be expanding the robot's capabilities and toolsets, which will make it usable for multiple types of infrastructure outside of storage tanks, including boilers, columns, spherical tanks, and offshore platforms.
- $910k (dilutive and non-dilutive)
- $830k in non-dilutive funding received to-date
- $90k received from DeepStar Technology Consortium
- $275k received from National Science Foundation** (NSF) Small Business Innovation & Research (SBIR) Phase 1 program.
- $20k received from NSF I-Corps
- $20k received from university pitch competitions: 3rd place at Baylor New Ventures, 1st place at NREL Energy Tech Southwest Region, and 8th place at the world-renowned Rice Business Plan competition.
- $75k received from university sources: 1) Texas Innovation Center research grant ($20k), 2) University Proof-of-Concept award ($25k), and 3) NSF Phase 2 Continuation award ($30k)
- $350k in corporate funding from Phillips 66: initial funding during beginning days as UT-Austin graduate research project (sponsored research agreement)
- $80k in dilutive funding to-date
- $80k received from NextFab Ventures
