The challenge
For years, the company built its business assessing and monitoring offshore sites for oil and gas. It knew how to send a vessel out, survey an area and turn complex marine data into decisions about where operations could safely happen.
Then the energy market shifted. Offshore wind is one of the fastest-growing parts of the renewable energy transition, and it needs exactly the kind of expertise the company already had: understanding the seabed, the surrounding environment and everything else that shares the water. The company made a strategic decision to pivot from oil and gas into wind farming.
The expertise transferred. The software didn't. The company's application and its assessment algorithms had been designed around oil and gas. Wind farm site assessment asks different questions, weighs different constraints and needs different outputs. Bolting new features onto the old system would have produced something confusing for users and fragile underneath.
The data itself added to the difficulty. Offshore assessment means working with many layers of spatial information at once: shipping lanes, environmental zones, existing infrastructure and the boundaries of the assessment area, much of it delivered as shapefiles and geo-coordinates. The new platform had to bring all of that together on one map in a way assessors could use quickly and with confidence.
Our approach
Act as CTO and engineering team
We took on the CTO and engineering role, working alongside the company's in-house team so their domain knowledge and our product and engineering skills sat in one group.
Redesign the product and the algorithms
We redesigned the full application for wind and helped retrofit the company's assessment algorithms for the new market, so the logic behind every assessment reflected the questions wind developers actually ask.
Build a map-first platform
We prototyped, then built, a map-based tool that layers shipping lanes and many other spatial datasets over each site assessment area. We built it on FlutterFlow with Mapbox, hosted on Google Cloud.
The results
Assessors now complete a site assessment 30% faster. With every relevant layer on one map, they spend less time pulling data together from different sources and more time interpreting it, which is where their expertise counts.
The platform gave the company a product designed for its new market from the ground up. Instead of an oil and gas tool stretched to fit, it has an application built around wind farm site assessment, with algorithms retrofitted for the new use case and a user experience shaped by the people who use it every day.
The pivot itself is the bigger result. The company was able to carry years of offshore expertise into one of the fastest-growing parts of the energy transition, with software that supports it. Working as an embedded CTO and engineering team meant the product strategy, the algorithm changes and the build moved together, without the delays that come from handing work between separate vendors.
For Lightning Ventures, the project shows how we work with technical, data-heavy businesses: deep in the domain, alongside the client's own experts, building the product their new strategy needs.
What this means for your business
If your business is pivoting into a new market, your expertise may transfer far more easily than your software. Systems built for the old business can quietly hold back the new one.
We help technical businesses rebuild their products for where they're heading, including complex spatial and data-heavy applications. We can act as your CTO and engineering team, work alongside your specialists, and get a product built for the new market into their hands quickly. If your strategy has changed and your software hasn't, let's talk.
