About Talisman
Built by engineers who know
what downtime actually costs.
Talisman was founded by a team of petroleum engineers, AI researchers, and field operators who saw firsthand how much production was being lost to static, decades-old control logic — and knew the technology existed to fix it.
Our Story
From the wellsite to the software stack.
Talisman was founded in 2019 in Okmulgee, Oklahoma — a town built on oil and gas. Our founders spent years optimizing plunger lift wells the hard way: driving routes to adjust timers, watching production fall on off-days, and manually diagnosing liquid loading events after the damage was done.
The insight was simple: the data to do this better already existed. Pressure transducers, flow meters, and RTUs were capturing everything — it was just sitting unanalyzed in a historian or discarded entirely.
We built the first version of our optimization engine on a $200 edge device connected to a single well in southeastern Oklahoma. In 90 days, that well's production improved by 34%. We've been scaling that result ever since.
Founded in Okmulgee, OK. First pilot deployment on a single plunger lift well.
Closed seed funding. Expanded to 50 wells across three Oklahoma operators.
Launched Talisman Edge Module v2. Expanded to Appalachian Basin and Permian.
Crossed 500 active well deployments. Opened engineering office in Houston.
Released multi-well fleet optimization. Launched Industry 4.0 product line.
Values
How we build, and why it matters.
Mission-Critical First
We only build AI for environments where failure has real consequences — production losses, safety incidents, regulatory exposure. Consumer-grade reliability is not acceptable here.
Edge-Native Architecture
Our systems are designed to operate autonomously in the field, with or without cloud connectivity. Intelligence lives at the point of control, not in a distant data center.
Operator in Control
Autonomous does not mean opaque. Every AI decision is logged, explainable, and overridable. Operators retain full authority — the AI augments, not replaces, their judgment.
Field-First Engineering
Our engineers spend time in the field, not just in product sprints. Every feature is tested against the messiness of real well behavior before it reaches production.
Leadership
The people behind the platform.
Dr. Alexei Kovalenko
Chief Executive Officer
Former VP Engineering at a midcontinent E&P operator. PhD in Petroleum Engineering, University of Oklahoma. 18 years in production optimization.
Sarah Okonkwo
Chief Technology Officer
Previously Principal ML Engineer at a tier-1 industrial IoT platform. Led deployment of predictive maintenance systems across 3,000+ assets.
Marcus Delgado
VP Field Operations
Former Production Superintendent at a Permian Basin operator. Oversaw artificial lift programs for 400+ wells. 20 years of field operations experience.
Dr. Lin Wei
Head of AI Research
PhD in Computational Engineering, MIT. Research focus on time-series anomaly detection and causal inference for physical systems.