rahd.AI has developed a platform that significantly reduces the cost of decommissioning oil and gas infrastructure, which is currently expected to cost over $200 billion worldwide by 2040.

Founded in Perth, Western Australia, the company has successfully completed pilots both there and in the UK. It is now scaling up its operations in Aberdeen with the appointment of global tech leader Innes Grant as chief operating officer.

Mr Grant spent 24 years in a similar role with digital consulting giant Avanade, a joint venture between Microsoft and Accenture, taking the Seattle-based business from launch to a vast workforce of 60,000 employees.

The 52-year-old is now returning to his native North-east of Scotland to help scale rahd.AI, which is on track to achieve a unicorn valuation of over £1bn inside four years.

He said: “We want to become the global default for facilitating decommissioning – the same way Skyscanner became the default for travel. And in doing so, we can save governments, operators and ultimately taxpayers tens of billions of pounds.

“Earlier this year, Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer posed the question on whether the UK wanted to be an AI taker or an AI maker. There is a global race for jobs of tomorrow and we can anchor many of these jobs in Aberdeen as we scale up this game-changing technology.

“Our platform not only aligns with the UK Government’s AI ambition, it also helps it tackle one of its most expensive industrial problems – reducing the cost of oil and gas decommissioning.”

The UK government has set a target of reducing decommissioning costs by 10% by 2026 and 35% by 2035.

With further support from government and industry, rahd.AI believes it can achieve the 35% saving by 2027, eight years ahead of the government’s target, potentially saving the UK Treasury £8bn.

The business is led by energy tech specialist Jake Stride, a former Global Technology Strategist at Microsoft and current board member of Subsea Energy Australia.

He said: “We are hugely excited to have Innes on board as we move to rapidly grow the business, scale up our development team and expand our global customer base. Innes’ appointment not only gives our customers confidence, but also by attracting such high calibre it underlines the credibility and positioning of our technology. 

“This is a proven, highly-scalable technology already delivering savings for some of the biggest players in global energy. Our AI models, trained on over 15,000 wells, 4,500 platforms and 2000 pipelines constitute the largest proprietary data set of its kind. 

“This technology will ultimately deliver what industry and government wants – which is smarter, faster and safer decommissioning plans.”

Decommissioning is a regulatory and financial burden for operators and governments, making any cost-saving tool highly valuable.

rahd.AI ‘s customer-led approach and strategic positioning have contributed to the business being valued at £20 million, with a clear path to potentially achieving unicorn status in 4 years. Meantime, it is focused on continuous growth. It has a $200 billion addressable market in front of it – with the UK Continental Shelf alone representing a $40-46 billion market. 

rahd.AI is a portfolio company of Ventex, the Aberdeen-based climate tech venture studio led by Steve Gray and Stuart McLeod, who both have a track record of success in building global businesses.

Mr McLeod said: “The oil and gas decommissioning sector presents one of the largest and most complex industrial challenges in the world. This market is essential to the global energy transition, and yet it is burdened by decades of unstructured data that complicate the safe and efficient shutdown and removal of infrastructure.

“Through partnerships with oil companies and governments who bear the decommissioning costs, rahd.AI has built one of the largest datasets of its kind in the world. This dataset has been used to train sophisticated AI models that generate actionable, validated insights for the planning and execution of decommissioning projects.

“This is an exciting development for Aberdeen, leveraging its status as a global centre of excellence for energy. We are offering a customer-led solution to an industry problem driven by an experienced team with a proven track record of scaling technology businesses worldwide”.