Entrepreneur of the Year 2024: DarkVision Technologies co-founder Stephen Robinson is changing how we view oil pipelines

THE KICKOFF: Aside from a few electro-mechanical (now called mechatronics) engineering co-ops at UBC, Stephen Robinson has never worked for anyone other than himself. During his final year of university, he launched ClearVision, an imaging-based quality inspection system for the packaging industry. Seven years later, in 2011, that company was acquired by a big U.S. competitor. After that, Robinson was itching for a new project.

So, he embraced his dark side. Robinson partnered with co-founders Graham Manders and Osman Malik to build North Vancouver-based Dark­Vision Technologies. The new venture built on Robinson and Manders’ previous experience with industrial imaging systems, but with a twist—as a first in the industry, they tapped into ultrasound technology. “There was a lot of potential in acoustic or ultrasound-based imaging in a lot of different industrial sectors, but starting with the energy sector,” Robinson says.

ACTION PLAN: Robinson and his team “started developing this really high-resolution, high-fidelity acoustic imaging system, targeting upstream energy assets—specifically, oil and gas wells and pipes,” he explains. The tool, called HADES, produces high-resolution, incredibly detailed (sub-millimetric) maps—say, of an entire oil pipeline. Think X-ray vision, but using ultrasound: HADES can capture detail right down to the individual threads inside a connection.

“[It is] analogous to early-stage cancer screening—we’re looking for cancer in industrial assets and we can find it at a very early stage with a very high degree of accuracy and very high resolution,” says Robinson. Because its proprietary technology creates such massive datasets (the biggest ultrasound datasets in the world, in fact), DarkVision also built its own software that can render, store and process the files. Customers then use the images to avert potentially disastrous oil spills or leaks—and the resulting profit losses and environmental consequences.

CLOSING STATEMENT: DarkVision was acquired by American corporate giant Koch Industries in 2020 with “the vision of creating a world-class industrial asset imaging platform,” explains Robinson. Since then, DarkVision has expanded across the U.S. and into Australia, Norway and Saudi Arabia.

But Robinson isn’t single minded about what the company can do. Dark­Vision has over 130 patents, and is putting them to good use. “We’ve tailored a couple of product lines to the energy sector… but we’re also making our own handheld devices out of [the proprietary technology] and a lot of manufacturing-based devices out of it… The technology applies to a whole spectrum of product lines for different sectors.”

Q+A

Describe your dream employee in three words:

Mind-reader, courageous, independent.