Let’s talk PrePad because when two ex-Shell engineers walk away from Big Oil with a mission, a model, and a market gap the size of the Permian, you don’t get a startup. You get a category.
Sean Hervo and Brandon Eidson didn’t leave Shell to build another shiny workflow tool. They left to solve a problem they’d been living: capital decisions in drilling and completions were stuck in a brutal tug-of-war between precision and usability. Legacy software was clunky. Excel was duct tape. And every engineer in the basin knew it. PrePad was born from that friction. A platform built not just to model wells but to simulate trade-offs, compress planning time, and cut the chaos out of capex.
Founded in 2021 and dual-headquartered in Calgary and Houston, PrePad’s not interested in being a sidekick to upstream management suites. They’re defining their own lane, cloud-based software that lives at the intersection of execution strategy, capital lifecycle management, and asset development. And now, with $2.8 million in seed funding (part dilutive, part non-dilutive), they’re gunning for deeper U.S. market penetration, product evolution, and a sales ramp built like a shale rig schedule—fast, relentless, and intentional.
Devon Energy didn’t just cut a check, they co-authored a technical paper with the PrePad team and dropped it at SPE’s Hydraulic Fracturing Technology Conference. Chevron backed them through its Catalyst Program and is now feeding real-world feedback back into the product loop. Add in support from Alberta Innovates, NRC IRAP, BDC, and former 3esi-Enersight execs like Deane Stewart and Dan Magyar, and you’ve got a cap table that reads more like an energy symposium than a seed round.
This isn’t theory. This is field-tested. Shell Canada, Chevron, Devon, Coterra, Birchcliff, and Teine aren’t kicking tires—they’re using PrePad to design, plan, and execute. We’re talking 90% reduction in simulation time. 30% cuts to planning cycles. And capital efficiency boosts of 15–25% by dialing in spacing, staging, and fluids, not guesses, not gut checks. Simulated, optimized, and operationalized.
Credit where it’s due: Sean Hervo brings 12 years in the trenches, Brandon Eidson lives and breathes workflow, and CTO Kohl Meister built a cloud-native system that doesn’t just run fast; it thinks smart. And it doesn’t sit on hard drives; it lives where teams live. Real-time collaboration for engineers, finance, and ops. Finally.
PrePad’s got the right team, the right tech, and the kind of investor alignment you don’t fake. They’re not just playing in the $15.6B drilling software sandbox; they’re redrawing the sandbox lines entirely.
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