Inside Kayrros: Manager Oscar Friedel on alternative problem-solving with data fusion
Tags: Travel, Data Science, Work, Company

Tailoring ideas into digital realities.

Kayrros Manager Oscar Friedel.

What if human imagination and alternative data could work in tandem? Oscar Friedel leads the development of Kayrros solutions, the tailor-made platforms displaying anything from thermal signatures on pipelines to digital twins of the world’s biggest cities. Playing on a background in the oil & gas industry and consulting, Oscar’s ambition is to pinpoint the core challenge of a company, break it down, and piece together a unique combination of data streams to form an interactive platform.

“We first need to understand a business’s industrial assets on the ground — such as power stations or refineries — and then calibrate external signals coming from all types of satellite imagery, geolocation data, news and open-sourced data to fuse all of these together and understand a new dimension of what’s happening.”

After pinpointing the key area of value — whether it’s a 3D digital model of Paris or an automated alert system that triggers when a tree branch grows too close to a high-voltage powerline — the team builds that value into an interface, almost like putting together a digital puzzle.

Oscar spent the past decade toeing the line between industry and tech. After spending one year in the French army, the return to an office in La Defense — the business core of Paris — didn’t last very long.

“I decided to expatriate myself to Gabon, where I spent a year and a half working for an E&P company at onshore fields in the middle of the jungle. I fell in love with this for multiple reasons, but the two main ones were the depth of the industry and the technologies that are used at every level of it. The oil and gas industry isn’t only about extracting oil from the ground; there are huge social, geo-strategical, environmental and technological implications. It’s one of the most important industries in the world but one of the lesser-known ones — I felt very drawn to it.”

Oscar in Iraqi Kurdistan.

After pursuing a higher-level degree in petroleum economics, Oscar turned to consulting, traveling from Nigeria to Kuwait and from Scotland to Saudi Arabia to drive global oil and gas companies in their strategies to reduce risk and boost efficiency. Then came a drive to combine on-the-ground industry experience with technology.

“It’s difficult to find a tech company that has deep knowledge of an industrial sector. I really wanted to be in a technological role, but stay connected to what’s on the ground and be close to actual industry processes — Kayrros is the perfect mix between a strong knowledge of what’s happening on the ground and the amazing capabilities of new technologies.”

Kayrros was founded with the mission of bringing transparency to the energy industry through advanced capabilities in alternative data development. Kayrros teams work with technologies with seemingly endless applications, spanning from carbon emissions detection to natural language processing. Oscar plays with it all.

“There isn’t a typical day at Kayrros. I’d say the most important thing in developing bespoke products is that the application possibilities are pretty endless, so there’s a lot of testing on different markets through lots of sectors.

We already have a very versatile platform comprised of different technological blocks that we use to bring new insights to our clients. The whole purpose of my job is to understand where clients will find the most value, and then make it happen.”

This article is part of the Inside Kayrros series. Next up: Laila El-Ashmawy