BlueMarvel AI Managing Director Shares Insight on Startup Journey

Venture studios, product development and market fit, business models, BlueMarvel AI's success, and Managing Director Keri Lee’s career journey were some of the topics covered during an inspiring conversation with InterGen Program Director Khalid Hansraj on June 20.

More than 100 people joined the CRIN-supported InterGen Breakfast Club event in person at the Energy Transition Centre and online to hear insight about BlueMarvel AI, an industrial operations software company and subsidiary of Spartan Controls.

Lee started her career in public relations, working in crisis communications for 10 years for a global PR firm. Entrepreneurship and PR shared an adrenaline-seeking element that drew her to both fields.

“What I enjoyed the most was supporting companies in getting through something really tough, and I had a huge passion for that,” she said. “But what I was also passionate about was helping organizations make the right operational decisions.”

That’s when she decided to pivot and do an MBA at American University in Washington, D.C. After relocating back to Calgary, she joined applied AI studio AltaML, before becoming Managing Director of BlueMarvel AI.

“We're looking at use cases and safety risks, so alarm and event data, bypass data, operator touches on the control system, to try to help operators manage their facilities more safely,” she said. “We're looking at components and reliability. So, some of that really big equipment that's in your facility, you're trying to get throughput, you're trying to create profitability for your organization. And so we're pulling the data off of those large assets and helping organizations figure out how to run them and at the optimal level, and then on the energy side, helping organizations manage their energy.”

BlueMarvel came out of AltaML’s venture studio. Lee described a venture studio as “a place to help an organization focus on the core of their business without having to worry about things like HR and finance and where you're going to set up your office and all those various pieces, so that you can work on the problem that you're trying to solve for the market.”

“We were originally being incubated in AltaML’s venture studio; they took care of all of those back-office pieces so that we could focus on delivering the solutions that we were trying to build without the rest of it being a distraction,” she said, noting their current partnership with Spartan Controls is similar to a venture studio.

One of the most challenging aspects to a startup, Lee told Hansraj, is finding product market fit.

“Where we've been really successful is that the use cases and the products that we've initially started with here today were born out of the brains of chemical engineers,” she said. “These are people that have a very deep knowledge of how these systems work and how it's going to actually be used in an industrial facility, which is super important. So, that SME expertise is what has allowed us to get as far as we have.”

Lee added that BlueMarvel is in its first 70 deployments, and with each deployment and partnership with a customer, they learn something new.

When it comes to product role, the most important thing is being able to “siphon through what you're hearing from SMEs, how customers are actually using it, and then working with sales on what's actually sellable to the market,” she shared.

Lee cited a recent rewarding moment for her team when they sat down with their partner AltaGas to see how their team is using the software. The experience brought “a tear to the eye” as BlueMarvel watched their software in use and providing benefit.