Energy commodity management platform Validere, which has its fastest-growing hub in Houston, plans to expand its local team after this week's announcement that it raised $43 million in financing.
The Canadian data technology company has around 40 employees working in Houston now but plans to hire more employees in engineering, sales and marketing roles.
Validere expanded operations into Houston in 2018 to be closer to new and potential U.S. customers in energy and commodities. The company's other main hubs are in Calgary and Toronto. Validere’s platform monitors, validates and forecasts the critical data at the facility level to enable companies to improve their operations, and make better commercial and emissions decisions.
"Validere’s mission is to ensure human prosperity through energy that is plentiful, sustainable and efficiently delivered. We facilitate this through integrating our customers’ core business with new environmental initiatives," said Nouman Ahmad, Validere co-founder and CEO. "In order to manage the energy transition well, environmental attributes cannot be managed in a silo, they need to be integrated in the day-to-day operations and commercial decisions.”
The company counts 45 energy companies – including Canada’s Vermilion Energy Inc. and two supermajor producers – as clients. It monitors the contents of more than six million barrels of oil daily as it positions itself to become a leading data provider and “system of record” for energy products through the global supply chain. Validere is the only platform that integrates data and insights on ESG markets with traditional commodity markets, giving clients a holistic picture for their core business decisions, officials said in a news release.
Validere also wants to continue investing in product engineering for its energy commodity management platform, the statement said. The company's cloud-based software collects and analyzes data for energy companies to make informed operational decisions, gain visibility into pricing and quality, measure and track carbon intensity and ESG metrics, and more.
Validere acts as the data layer for multiple environmental tracking initiatives, including a tokenization of voluntary carbon credits generated from a Carbon Capture, Utilization and Storage (CCUS) project that was transacted on blockchain, as well as the certification of operators that produce responsibly sourced natural gas (RSG) in partnership with leading third-party organizations such as Xpansiv, where RSG is verified to meet certain ESG standards such as methane emission intensity.
