Category-defining AI product suite equips oil and gas industry professionals with an energy-specific knowledge base to enable more efficient, data-driven, and user-friendly operations

Platform eliminates time spent searching for information, allowing engineers, founders, operators and other professionals to focus on high-impact decisions while decreasing costs and increasing revenue

HOUSTON–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Collide, the GenAI Platform for the energy sector, today announced the closing of its $5 million seed round, led by Mercury Fund, with participation from Bryan Sheffield, Billy Quinn, and David Albin, as well as a number of other oil and gas leaders. The new funding will enable Collide to further enhance and accelerate the development of its GenAI-powered platform and strategically expand its engineering and technical teams.

Driven by a significant generational shift in its workforce, the energy industry stands at a unique juncture. Historically slow to embrace new technologies, the sector now faces an urgent need for innovation. This urgency stems from the retirement of Baby Boomers, who are exiting with valuable industry knowledge, and a notable gap in Gen X professionals, which has hindered digital progress. Meanwhile, the rise of Millennials to leadership positions brings a strong drive to modernize operations and adopt AI, catalyzing a rapid transformation in the industry’s approach to technology, particularly in knowledge retention and AI implementation. Collide is at the forefront of this transition from outdated legacy software to AI-native solutions.

Founded by oil and gas industry veterans, Collide was built to be the knowledge hub for the next generation of energy professionals. Initially designed as a professional network and digital community for technical discussions and knowledge sharing, Collide has now shifted its focus to the rollout of its enterprise-level AI-enabled solution. By integrating retrieval augmented generation (RAG) and advanced large language models (LLMs) with a specialized knowledge base, Collide’s AI-native platform retrieves and synthesizes data from authoritative sources to deliver accurate, cited, and energy-focused insights to oil and gas professionals.

Unlike large AI and data platforms, such as OpenAI, Perplexity, and Microsoft Copilot, Collide’s platform uniquely accesses a comprehensive, industry-specific knowledge base, including technical papers, internal processes, and a curated Q&A database tailored to energy professionals. This specialized foundation allows Collide to deliver accurate responses with real citations, ensuring precision and reliability by eliminating external noise and focusing solely on pertinent energy content.

Collide currently services public and private enterprise oil and gas clients, and other private equity-backed E&Ps. Since launching, Collide has onboarded over 6,000 users to its community platform, growing at 11% month-over-month. Users span 122 countries, connecting energy professionals worldwide. The platform currently delivers an estimated time savings of 25–33% for petroleum engineers. As Collide expands its generative AI portfolio, it aims to further streamline workflows across various roles in the oil and gas sector, freeing teams to focus on higher-value tasks and driving greater operational efficiency.

“The world’s greatest challenge today is an energy crisis, and we’re excited to have a partner in Mercury Fund that understands our vision and supports us as we work to empower energy professionals with the community and technology needed to power the world,” said Collin McLelland, Co-Founder and CEO of Collide.

“Co-founders Collin McLelland and Chuck Yates bring a unique understanding of the oil and gas industry. Their backgrounds, combined with Collide’s proprietary knowledge base, create a significant and strategic moat for the platform,” said Blair Garrou, Managing Partner at Mercury. “Collide’s vertical AI approach is uniquely designed to tackle the complex challenges of the energy sector, delivering solutions that are more precise and impactful than those offered by general-purpose GenAI tools. This is exactly the kind of company Mercury seeks to partner with to drive transformative, industry-specific change.”

Collide also counts a leading slate of oil and gas executives and firms as investors including Embry Canterbury, Gene Shepherd, Dan Pickering, Steven Cobb, Trey Yates, and Arbo Ventures.

About Collide

Collide is a community-driven knowledge sharing platform for the energy industry. An exclusive hub where thousands of engineers, geoscientists, and field operators discuss specialized technical information. Collide AI, Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) helps energy professionals find information quickly from energy-specific content in the Collide Knowledge Base backed by authoritative sources. Try it out for free on collide.io.

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