COMPANY/DALLAS, TEXAS / ANTHONY, KANSAS/FOUNDED 2026
A hardware company that measures things honestly.
Crude Intelligence builds autonomous aerial and downhole systems for operators of geographically distributed oil and gas assets. We own the aircraft, the sensors, and the data layer, which is why our measurement is continuous rather than scheduled. We are not an inspection service vendor with a rented drone.
We operate from Dallas, Texas and Anthony, Kansas, close to the wells we are built for. Airframes, electronics, and downhole tooling are designed, sourced, and assembled in the United States. We fly today under Part 107 waivers and are building to the Part 108 detect-and-avoid and electronic conspicuity requirements now. We claim no regulatory approvals we do not hold, and we label every system by its real maturity.
Our thesis is narrow on purpose. The wells that need measuring most are the ones nobody will send a truck to — marginal, scattered, and unobserved for weeks at a time. Premium intervention tooling answers what exactly is wrong with one expensive well. We answer whether anything is wrong with any of four hundred cheap ones.
MISSION/WHY WE EXIST
A well is checked, on average, a few times a month. The rest of the time, it is unobserved. Pressure drifts. A seal fails. Gas vents. A tank overflows into a berm nobody will look at for three weeks. Somewhere in the same field, a hole drilled in 1948 that appears on no map continues to breathe methane into the air above a rancher’s pasture.
This is not negligence. It is arithmetic. There are more than a million wells in the United States and a shrinking number of people willing to drive to them.
We think the answer is not more windshield time. It is instrumentation.
We build autonomous systems that go where people can’t go often enough, and to one place people cannot go at all — inside the wellbore. Long-endurance aircraft that fly a lease for ten hours and come back with a model of it. Carriers that place sensors on the ground and retrieve them. Downhole vehicles that see what a logging truck sees, without the logging truck.
Everything we build is designed, sourced, and assembled in the United States.
FOUNDERS/NO HEADSHOTS
MICHAEL SCHULER
ENGINEERING
SUAS national first place
AUSTIN PORTER
SYSTEMS / SIGNALS
USAF signals background
MIKE MACCHIAROLI
CAPITAL
Serial exited founder, power and electricity
HIRING/WE ARE LOOKING FOR
→AIRFRAME STRUCTURES — COMPOSITE AND METALLIC, VTOL TRANSITION EXPERIENCE
→EMBEDDED FIRMWARE — FLIGHT CONTROL, SENSOR INTEGRATION, CAN
→FIELD OPS LEAD — SOMEONE WHO HAS ACTUALLY WORKED A LEASE
If you have built one of these things and it flew, or it went downhole and came back, write to us directly. Tell us what broke the first time.
TALK TO ENGINEERING →