NthDS became an inaugural recipient of a Houston Business Journal’s Innovation Award this week. Founded in 2018, NthDS revolutionized oil and gas data management with a powerful new A.I. software that saves organizations unprecedented time and labor costs by digitizing well log data and other records in the blink of an eye.
New for 2019, HBJ’s Innovation Awards recognize companies large and small using innovative methods and concepts to show measurable growth. NthDS’s award was presented at a luncheon at the Marriott Marquis Houston on October 26, 2019 honoring the city’s best new companies.
“We’re very proud to be recognized by a respected institution like HBJ for the groundbreaking work we’re doing,” said NthDS CEO Michael Ramirez. “We’ve developed an evolution in efficiency beyond manual data entry that the oil and gas industry has never seen before.”
Manual data entry is slow, expensive, and impractical, making hundreds of thousands of historical well logs and other records obsolete and useless. NthDS’s innovative Nspect software package uses artificial intelligence to instantly scan all kinds of records, from printouts to typed pages to handwritten notes. No matter how old, no matter how damaged, and no matter how illegible, Nspect can add any records—including well log data—into a client’s database of choice, saving weeks of work and tens of thousands of dollars in labor costs over manual recovery.
Jonathan Adams of the HBJ interviewed Mike Ramirez before the event and wrote a brief summary of their discussion. Read his full article
How did you come up with your concept? Mike Ramirez discovered the innovation at an abstract while trying to use machine learning to automate data entry processes. The story followed the basic beats of great tech disruption from there: Two nerds, including Mike, sat down in a garage and worked 20 hours a day for four months to give birth to a new kind of machine-learning artificial intelligence.
What makes your innovation unique? No other technology can extract well-log and core-analysis data automatically from almost any kind of records, from 40-year-old dot-matrix printouts to stained, 80-year-old typewritten files and even handwritten reports. There have been attempts made before, but never with the incredible level of accuracy provided by machine learning. Nspect changes everything for exploration companies, who previously relied on manual searching, reading and data-entry processes to extract, search and model data on old wells that are viable again thanks to modern drilling tech. Now, thanks to Nspect, exploration companies use real-time data to make smarter, faster decisions on where to drill. Nspect is the only AI of its kind that can perform this function.
