In December 2018, an Austin company wrote a cheque of about C$46m to a software firm in Calgary.
The buyer was then called Drillinginfo. The seller was Cortex Business Solutions, which automated the invoices that oil and gas companies swap with their suppliers. The deal put Enverus, as the company would soon be known, on the Canadian map and explains why this American-headquartered business is on a list of Canadian startups. Its software is used in Calgary offices every day.
Oil and gas companies spend freely in booms and cut hard in busts, and a business that sells to them rides the same cycle.
The story starts in Texas, around 1999, when Drillinginfo began collecting public drilling records and selling them as searchable data. Allen Gilmer is credited with founding it, though we have not been able to verify the details of his early life. A geologist's instinct to look for patterns in the ground, applied to paperwork, seems to have been the idea.
The records were public. The value was in making them usable. An independent oil company that wanted to know who was drilling next to its lease, or which acreage was changing hands, no longer needed a landman and a stack of filings. A subscription replaced the stack.
The hard part came after the data. Oil and gas companies spend freely in booms and cut hard in busts, and a business that sells to them rides the same cycle. Drillinginfo's answer was to move from information into software that people used daily. It bought MineralSoft in 2017, Oildex in September 2018 from Accel-KKR, and then Cortex.
In 2020, it renamed itself Enverus. The new name reflected a wider ambition, with the company's reach going beyond oil and into power and renewables. Private-equity firms, among them Genstar Capital and Insight Partners and later Hellman & Friedman, have owned stakes along the way.
Revenue is not published, and founders' accounts of the early lean years are not easy to find. What the record shows is a pattern of buying useful tools, joining them under one login and selling the bundle to a demanding industry.
A first-time founder can read a quiet lesson in that sequence. The first product made information searchable. The durable business came from sitting inside the customer's daily work, where leaving is expensive and staying is easy.