SeekOps’ Revenue Growth Story: Converting Pilots into 300-Site Deployments

In industrial markets, small pilot projects often stay small. But SeekOps found a way to turn initial trials into major enterprise deployments, tripling their revenue in a single year.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, SeekOps CEO Iain Cooper revealed their playbook for transforming pilot programs into large-scale enterprise contracts.

The Science-First Foundation

Before pursuing rapid expansion, SeekOps invested heavily in validation. “They worked closely with Stanford University on validating the technology, that independent validation of the technology being really important for them,” Iain explains. This scientific credibility became crucial for enterprise sales conversations.

The validation approach helped secure early funding and support: “Subsequently got funding from the Oil and Gas Climate Initiative climate investments group, which again enabled them to grow further and work on some of the offshore technology deployments.”

From Pilots to Scale

The key to SeekOps’ growth was their approach to pilot programs. As Iain notes: “That’s really all been about the transition from operators, trialing pilots, seeing how these technologies work from one or two jobs to I want to come and do 300 well pads or can you come back every quarter?”

Rather than treating pilots as technical demonstrations, they designed them to showcase comprehensive value. “We typically show up as well and perform an orthomosaic map. This is a high resolution image survey so that we can really put where those emissions we have found on that image and give them the context of the operation.”

Solving Real Business Problems

SeekOps aligned their solution with pressing business challenges, particularly around regulatory compliance. “We’ve actually helped a number of the larger operators achieve OGMP Two gold standard with our technology,” Iain shares. This regulatory alignment created natural expansion opportunities.

Their quantification capability proved especially valuable: “Really our differentiation is we actually quantify the emissions so we can tell them the rate of emission so it enables them to one, roll up their emission statistics, whether they’re going to use it for ESG reporting or enable them to triage the repairs.”

Building Scale Through Partners

Rather than building massive internal operations, SeekOps scaled through partnerships. “We don’t plan on adding a lot of heads because again, our business model really is to scale with those drone service providers as independent industrial drone companies that have already got significant flight approvals from operators,” Iain explains.

This partner approach enabled rapid expansion: “We are now commercial on six continents, we’ve trained at least two or more drone service companies in each of our key regions.” The result? “Last year we tripled our revenue from the previous year.”

Future-Proofing Growth

Looking ahead, SeekOps is focused on automation to support continued scaling. “I want to automate from proposal to payment… so when a customer comes with a request, everything, including the survey, the data analysis, and our payment is automated,” Iain shares.

This automation strategy aims to make larger deployments more efficient while ensuring consistent quality across sites.

For B2B tech founders, SeekOps’ growth story offers valuable lessons about scaling in enterprise markets:

1. Start with rigorous validation to build credibility
2. Design pilots to demonstrate comprehensive value
3. Align with regulatory and business imperatives
4. Build scalable operations through partnerships
5. Automate to maintain quality at scale

The key insight? Success in enterprise markets often comes not from pushing technology, but from making it easy for customers to say yes to bigger deployments by consistently delivering clear business value.