Breaker19 is an Uber-like truck booking platform founded by two Houstonians. Photo by Marcin Jozwiak/Pexels

In a world where ”the customer is always right," two Houston founders have followed that rule right to their next venture.

Breaker19 — a groundbreaking mobile application built in late 2023 to be an efficient oilfield trucking and hotshot marketplace — was co-founded by Rodney Giles and Tyler Cherry. The native Houstonians also co-founded BidOut, a leading Oil & Gas procurement platform in 2021.

“About a year ago, one of our BidOut clients, a large operator, came to us and basically said that the biggest problem they have in the oil field is ordering trucks,” remembers Giles. “From there, they asked would we be willing to build something similar to Uber, but for oilfield logistics and trucking? So, we built Breaker19.”

After their customer presented a challenge, Giles and Cherry got to work. They envisioned the technical architecture almost immediately and assembled a team of software engineers to build an in-house application in less than a year.

“We launched Breaker19 in November 2023, and my goodness, it has taken off like crazy,” says Giles. “It is growing incredibly fast. We’re doing hundreds of truckloads a day now, all throughout West Texas, South Texas, North Dakota, really all over the U.S.”

Now, armed with such large publicly traded companies as British Petroleum, Breakout19 has a network of more than 1,500 trucks similar to transportation companies like Uber, where drivers make themselves available to be dispatched according to their health, safety and environmental requirements.

Breaker19 is doing so well, in fact, that it’s sped past Giles and Cherry’s original collaboration, BidOut.

“Breaker 19's probably, you know, growing ten times of where BidOut even was in its early days,” says Giles. “So, we'll always explore options that make sense for our shareholders. Fortunately, my co-founder and I have previous companies that we built and sold and have experience in scaling and have experiences in multiple departments, whether it be finance or sales or marketing or operations.

“So, currently, we do operate BidOut and Breaker19 separately, but they are, you know, through common operating structures. And, you know, we're able to maintain the scale and maintain the growth right now. And right now, the company is doing great financially and has cash flow positives. So, for us, you know, our goal is just to continue. I feel like we've kind of solved an archaic problem and did it in a really simple way, and it's working out pretty well.”

And it all started with a simple question from a customer — "Hey, can you guys come up with something like this?"

“It all came together just by listening to our customer’s needs,” says Giles. “And we always try to go into our clients and help them with a lot of what they do. But we always want to know about what their other pain points are. You know, there's still people, you know, that are operating with very archaic processes, very, you know, manual back-office processes. And our job is to speed them up with software. And so Breaker19 was able to do that.”

Practically speaking, Breaker19 is more than a software solution. It also closes the gap between qualified drivers and end clients by vetting participants for the platform in an efficient and pragmatic fashion.

“We have a very rigorous vetting process for the drivers,” Giles explains. “I mean, that's really what makes the oil and gas trucking industry so unique. Insurance requirements have to be significantly higher than most carriers. They have to go through very well-funded safety trainings where they are familiar with the oil field. And then number three, these drivers have to have personal protective equipment. They have to have flame-retardant clothing, they have to have slo-mo boots and they have to have hard hats.”

Procedure is important, but professionalism is equally important to Breaker19.

“You know, we do not allow the carrier to show up on a customer's locations in shorts and flip-flops or Crocs and, you know, be protected,” says Giles. “And so, for what we're dealing with is very mission critical, but also very, you know, very high-risk.

“For example, we are checking insurance statuses four times a day. If a carrier were to cancel their insurance, we're aware of it immediately because we want to make sure that we always have active insurance in place. So, we have a process that these carriers go through. Again, we've got over 1,500 of them now that are well-vetted and well-qualified.”

As Breaker19 continues to scale, Giles and Cherry hope their burgeoning app becomes the go-to ordering platform for the entire oil and gas industry for all of their trucking, hot shot and transportation needs.

“We're bringing on some significant, large enterprise clients right now that make up 10% of the U.S. market share for each customer,” says Giles “So I think when we start to compound those, I think we easily see the trajectory there as really being something that's taking off pretty fast. So, I think at the end of the day, we just hope to keep delivering a great experience for our clients, make their ordering process easy.”

With both BidOut and Breaker19 doing great financially, proud Klein Oak High School alums Giles and Cherry have purchased a steer to support Texas youth and agricultural causes. Additionally, moving forward, the duo pledges to give away a full steer each month to a customer of their Breaker19 platform.

"We are passionate about giving back to our community and nurturing the next generation of leaders in Texas," says Cherry. "Having personally experienced the transformative impact of FFA, we saw this initiative as a meaningful way to both support local agriculture and provide our clients with a taste of authentic Texas beef.”

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This article originally ran on InnovationMap.

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Houston clean energy company to develop hybrid renewable project in Port Arthur

power project

Houston-based clean energy company Diligence Offshore Services has announced a strategic partnership with Florida-based floating solar manufacturing company AccuSolar for the development of a renewable energy project in the Port Arthur area.

Known as the Pleasure Island Power Collective, it will be built on 2,275 acres across Pleasure Island and Sabine Lake. It is expected to generate 391 megawatts of clean power, alongside a utility-scale battery energy storage system. It will also feature a 225-megawatt coastal onshore wind farm, with energy produced on-site used to power a data center for adaptive superintelligence, making it entirely self-sustained by renewable sources, according to the company.

AccuSolar will design and manufacture the project and power will be distributed through the Canaan Energy Corridor

“We are incredibly proud to partner with a fellow U.S. company like AccuSolar,” Harry C. Crawford III, founder and managing member of Diligence Offshore, said in a news release. “Their expertise in American manufacturing and floating solar technology is essential to the success of the Pleasure Island Power Collective.”

The project is expected to bring economic growth and a significant number of manufacturing jobs to the area during the construction phase and long-term operations.

Diligence Offshore is pursuing a DPA Title 1 DX rating under the Defense Production Act to help advance the project's development schedule, according to the release, which could lead to immediate manufacturing jobs.

“This partnership not only strengthens our domestic supply chain but also accelerates our vision to bring economic freedom and climate resilience to the Gulf Coast,” Crawford added in the release.

Houston organization proposes Gulf Coast index for hydrogen market

hydrogen index

The Clean Hydrogen Buyers Alliance has proposed an index aimed at bringing transparency to pricing in the emerging hydrogen market.

The Houston-based alliance said the Gulf Coast Hydrogen Index, based on real-time data, would provide more clarity to pricing in the global market for hydrogen. The benchmarking effort is being designed to benefit clean hydrogen buyers, sellers and investors. The index would help position the U.S. “as the trading anchor for hydrogen’s next chapter as a globally traded commodity,” the alliance said.

According to ResearchAndMarkets.com, the global market for clean hydrogen was valued at $200 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach $700 billion by 2040.

John Flory, president of the alliance, said the lack of a pricing index has relegated hydrogen to niche-market status.

“Capital is waiting. Buyers are ready. But until now, there’s been no credible, transparent pricing signal to guide clean hydrogen investing or contracting,” Edward Morse, co-chairman of the Clean Hydrogen Transaction Advisory Committee, said in a news release.

The index would treat the Gulf Coast as the primary delivery hub for pipeline-grade hydrogen in three categories: basic, low-carbon and ultra-low-carbon. It would be similar to the Henry Hub index for pricing of natural gas.

Roger Ballentine, co-chairman of the clean energy advisory committee, said the hydrogen index would build confidence in this energy source among government agencies, companies and investors. A Henry Hub-style benchmark for hydrogen “provides clarity, reduces risk, and lays the foundation for clean energy to become a globally traded commodity critical to decarbonization,” he said.

The Gulf Coast, with Texas as the focal point, is key to the evolution of the U.S. clean hydrogen economy, according to the Fuel Cell and Hydrogen Energy Association.

At the core of the Gulf Coast’s role is the U.S. Department of Energy's selection of the Gulf Coast as one of the country’s seven regional hubs for clean hydrogen. However, the DOE has proposed cutting funding for the HyVelocity Gulf Coast Hydrogen Hub, a $1.2 billion development in Texas and Louisiana by AES, Air Liquide, Chevron, ExxonMobil, MHI Hydrogen Infrastructure and Ørsted, according to a new list of proposed DOE funding cancellations.

2 Houston energy giants appear on Fortune’s inaugural AI ranking

AI Leaders

Two Houston-area energy leaders appear on Fortune’s inaugural list of the top adopters of AI among Fortune 500 companies.

They are:

  • No. 7 energy company ExxonMobil, based in Spring
  • No. 47 energy company Chevron, based in Houston

They are joined by Spring-based tech company Hewlett Packard Enterprise, No. `9.

All three companies have taken a big dive into the AI pool.

In 2024, ExxonMobil’s executive chairman and CEO, Darren Woods, explained that AI would play a key role in achieving a $15 billion reduction in operating costs by 2027.

“There is a concerted effort to make sure that we're really working hard to apply that new technology to the opportunity set within the company to drive effectiveness and efficiency,” Woods told Wall Street analysts.

At Chevron, AI tools are being used to quickly analyze data and extract insights from it, according to tech news website VentureBeat. Also, Chevron employs advanced AI systems known as large language models (LLMs) to create engineering standards, specifications and safety alerts. AI is even being put to work in Chevron’s exploration initiatives.

Bill Braun, Chevron’s chief information officer, said at a VentureBeat-sponsored event in 2024 that AI-savvy data scientists, or “digital scholars,” are always embedded within workplace teams “to act as a catalyst for working differently.”

The Fortune AIQ 50 ranking is based on ServiceNow’s Enterprise AI Maturity Index, an annual measurement of how prepared organizations are to adopt and scale AI. To evaluate how Fortune 500 companies are rolling out AI and how much they value AI investments, Fortune teamed up with Enterprise Technology Research. The results went into computing an AIQ score for each company.

At the top of the ranking is Alphabet (owner of Google and YouTube), followed by Visa, JPMorgan Chase, Nvidia and Mastercard. Aside from ExxonMobil, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and Chevron, two other Texas companies made the list: Arlington-based homebuilder D.R. Horton (No. 29) and Austin-based software company Oracle (No. 37).

“The Fortune AIQ 50 demonstrates how companies across industry sectors are beginning to find real value from the deployment of AI technology,” Jeremy Kahn, Fortune’s AI editor, said in a news release. “Clearly, some sectors, such as tech and finance, are pulling ahead of others, but even in so-called 'old economy' industries like mining and transport, there are a few companies that are pulling away from their peers in the successful use of AI.

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This article originally appeared on InnovationMap.com.