The Founders

Tyler started his career as a directional driller at SLB, operating across the Middle East, Africa, and the United States. With a background in petroleum engineering, he spent years on the operational front lines; environments where equipment failures have real consequences and field teams make critical decisions with the information they have.

He then pivoted to software engineering, spending over six years at one of the world's largest tech companies building production-scale systems. That dual fluency, understanding both how field operations run and how software systems are actually built, is what he brings to Novanix AI.

Tyler founded Novanix AI because he recognized that the operational challenges he lived through in energy exist across every industry where physical work meets high stakes. Construction teams managing complex builds, manufacturing plants running aging equipment, industrial operations buried in decades of documentation they can't efficiently access, these are all variations of the same problem. The AI tools being built for these industries are designed by people who've never worked in them, and the teams being asked to adopt those tools can tell.

Novanix builds AI systems for energy, industrial, and construction companies; designed for the people who actually use them, in environments where reliability isn't a feature request, it's a safety requirement.

Lesley spent years as a Sr. AI Engineer at Shell, building and deploying predictive maintenance systems inside refineries and developing AI solutions for upstream operations in the Gulf of Mexico. She built them inside the facilities where they had to perform, working alongside the operations and maintenance teams who depended on them.

That experience gave her a perspective most AI practitioners never develop: the challenges that derail AI in energy operations (governance blind spots, compliance requirements, field adoption, safety constraints) are the same challenges that derail AI in construction, manufacturing, and heavy industry. The regulations differ. The equipment differs. But the pattern of failure is identical: systems built by people who understand the technology but have never worked in the environments where it has to survive.

She co-founded Novanix AI to serve companies across energy, industrial operations, and construction that need AI built for their reality. Novanix specializes in AI strategy, governance, and RAG-based knowledge systems that turn accumulated operational documentation into reliable, auditable tools for the teams who need them, whether those teams are on a refinery floor, a construction site, or a manufacturing line.

Lesley holds certifications in cybersecurity and is an active participant in the AI safety and AI security communities. In industries where AI systems interact with physical infrastructure and regulated processes, security and safety are not separate concerns from the engineering. They are the engineering.