Today marks an important milestone for AI-driven analytics startup, OilX, and its incubator, Signal Ventures. OilX is acquired by Energy Aspects, a leading energy consultancy providing research, analysis and data of all the key energy commodities.

OilX is the first startup accelerated through Signal’s venture studio, which provides founders and early stage teams with hands-on support in the form of investment, shared services such as legal, finance, HR, as well as critical acceleration through the use of Signal’s technology and data.

Florian Thaler, founder and CEO of OilX, joined Signal as Entrepreneur in Residence following a career as an oil strategist at Shell, Citigroup and Och-Ziff. After 15 months of development, by leveraging Signal data feeds and technology solutions such as vessel voyage data and scraping technologies, OilX was released to market in early 2019. The newly formed entity attracted further capital from external investors such as Citigroup and GS Caltex and received grants from the European Space Agency. Rapidly OilX became an award-winning, best-in-class oil analytics platform and currently employs 30 people across London, Athens and Vienna.

OilX’s product range covers crude oil, refined products, biofuels and NGLs. OilX’s SaaS Platform, the world’s first real-time oil supply and demand balance, provides oil traders and analysts with market analysis ahead of official data releases and relative to consensus estimates. OilX’s WhatsApp bot also enables users to receive instant responses to queries about the entire global oil supply demand balance.

Signal Group CEO, Ioannis Martinos, said: "Big congratulations to Florian and his team! This is a proud moment for Signal Ventures and the wider Signal Group. Our vision is to generate value and accelerate development for incubated startups. With OilX we went from an Entrepreneur in Residence with a small team in 2017, to a successful scale-up and eventually the acquisition from an industry leader in only five years.

"We are doing this through close collaboration and by achieving significant synergies with the rest of the Group.

"The team at Signal Ventures, with its industry pedigree and world-class support, is deeply committed to the sector. OilX is a tremendous success story and we're looking forward to working with more entrepreneurs who have great ideas and exciting technologies."

Florian Thaler, CEO of OilX, said: "The close collaboration, expertise and support from the Signal Group has been invaluable as OilX reaches this major step in its growth story.

"We are now looking forward to combining state of the art AI technology with top-class analysts to produce the highest quality information for our clients.”