Meet Akselos, a pioneer in energy infrastructure innovation

Akselos is a mission-driven company focused on accelerating the energy transition through a once-in-a-generation upgrade to mechanical computer-aided engineering. The platform creates digital twins of energy infrastructures in order to improve their design, maintenance, reliability and lifetime. Customers use Akselos Integra & Akselos Innovate to optimize operations and lower operating costs, by learning from the digital twins and protecting their most critical assets.

We recently caught up with Thomas Leurent, Co-Founder and CEO of Akselos, to hear the story behind the world’s fastest engineering simulation technology and how it helps to design and protect the sustainable world we all want to live in.

Thomas Leurent, Co-Founder and CEO of Akselos

Can you tell us a bit about what your company does, what problems you solve for your customers, and what you are focusing on at the moment?

Thomas: Akselos is the creator of the world’s most advanced engineering simulation technology. Founded in 2012, Akselos now has operations in Europe, the United States, and South East Asia. The company’s products are designed specifically to help protect energy infrastructure with real-time, condition-based monitoring. Using patented algorithms developed with over 15 years of research at MIT and funded by the US Department of Defense, Akselos‘ structural digital twin solution is helping the energy sector optimize design, lower operating costs, and extend the life of aging assets.

We are currently active in three energy industry sectors: Offshore Wind, Downstream Oil & Gas and upstream Oil & Gas.

How did you come up with the idea for Akselos?

Thomas: The idea for Akselos was born at MIT 20 years ago among mathematicians and engineers who were relentlessly focusing on a new innovation curve for FEA, called RB-FEA.

Famous among engineers for its predictive power, FEA is used to design everything from airplanes, to oil rigs, bridges and offshore wind turbines. What we achieved though, with RB- FEA, is 1000x faster and 10x more accurate than the industry standard when modelling large-scale assets.

Today, Akselos’ technology protects critical multi-billion-dollar assets for some of the largest energy operators on the planet, recognized by class societies, and changing the game for engineers and asset owners in an increasingly digitized world.

How is your software supporting the transition towards green energy? How can it help offshore wind operators?

Thomas: What Akselos brings to the energy transition is a solution that helps giga-scale Offshore Wind projects become bankable and more sustainable, mainly by reducing material used and shortening engineering time while achieving design optimization. These benefits are critical to winning bids and increasing return on equity for large projects. The sector needs to use the most advanced technology on the market to fulfill ambitious capacity targets in line with wider energy transition goals.

Additionally, Akselos technology is used to maintain infrastructure integrity in the Oil & Gas industry, to avoid building new assets in a sector that needs to shift toward renewable energy.

What is your long-term vision for Akselos? Are other engineering sectors on your radar?

Thomas: RB-FEA technology can be used for many purposes. We chose to focus initially on helping the energy transition. Down the road, the entire built world can benefit from the power of this technology, from aerospace to electronics.

What makes Future Energy Ventures different?

Thomas: Future Energy Ventures (FEV) is the perfect partner for Akselos as the team understands the urgency of the energy crisis. FEV is a partner that aligns with our culture, shares our vision for the future, and has been a very reliable investor, trusting and supporting our experts.

What does the recent $16.5m funding round mean for the development of Akselos?

Thomas: With our physics-based digital twin software already on the market for years now, this funding round enables Akselos to invest mainly in scale. The goal is to build upon impressive growth to date in customer portfolio and headcount with sales representative hires across the globe to bring new ARR (annual recurring revenue) bookings, helping achieve 100% to 150% annual growth for the next three years, as we have for the past three years.

We are also hiring new developers to further refine our product to fit the needs of our three core industry sectors.

Our ultimate goal is to reinforce our position as a provider of the world’s most advanced technology in the FEAworld, protecting and extending the life of current energy infrastructure while deploying innovation and capital toward new infrastructure that will support the ambitious Net Zero 2050 roadmap.

FEV’s view on Akselos

We invested in Akselos in 2018 together with Shell. We were immediately intrigued by the underlying technology and the team we met. The company has dedicated a lot of work and time to developing and bringing existing methods of Finite Element Analysis to the next level. We believe that Thomas and his team are on a very well-paved path to become a leader in the area of engineering simulation technology for all kinds of industries and we are proud to support them on that path.