Ouronova

Ouronova is a Brazilian deep-tech company that designs, builds and operates inspection and intervention robots for the offshore oil and gas industry. It was formed in October 2010 as Ouro Negro through the merger of three spin-offs from laboratories at PUC-Rio, and renamed ouronova in 2021; the legal entity remains Ouro Negro Tecnologias em Equipamentos Industriais S/A, based at Rua General Argolo 61 in the Sao Cristovao district of Rio de Janeiro. CTO Arthur Braga is a Stanford mechanical engineering PhD who taught at PUC-Rio for more than three decades and holds 22 filed patents; CEO Eduardo Costa previously co-founded the fibre-optic sensing company Gavea Sensors.

The robotics line centres on a modular family of electrically driven in-pipe crawlers for non-piggable pipelines, drilling risers and subsea tubulars. TATUI covers 2.5 to 5 inch bores with a self-adjusting locomotion system that needs no process flow to propel it, carrying visual and wall-thickness sensing. SIMAS covers 6 to 15 inch bores with a pan-tilt-zoom high-definition camera, laser projection and image processing accurate to 0.03 mm, enough to measure weld root penetration height, and accepts ultrasonic, geometric and gamma-ray modules. SIMAO covers 14 to 25 inch bores over an umbilical, with time-of-flight diffraction ultrasound, magnetic flux leakage, geometric and wall-thickness modules alongside a high-resolution PTZ camera. HAZMAG is a magnetic-adhesion crawler for visual inspection of metallic surfaces in confined and hazardous spaces, in service since 2011 across nuclear plants, oil and gas structures and ship hulls, with more than five terabytes of inspection imagery analysed to date.

Two further robotic programmes are in development rather than commercial service. Tankbotics addresses cleaning, inspection and painting inside FPSO tanks with results fed into a digital twin, developed with Equinor and Brazil's ANP. WellRobot is a through-tubing autonomous downhole platform intended to replace wireline, slickline, coiled tubing and rig-based well intervention, using onboard temperature, pressure, casing collar locator and internal-diameter sensing with wireless communication to a docking station; it is being developed with Repsol Sinopec Brasil and ANP and won an ANP technological innovation award in 2021 and a place in the 2022 World Oil Awards finals. ROBIN applies light well intervention from ROV support vessels.

Outside robotics the portfolio includes the MODA fibre-optic monitoring system for flexible risers, which won an ANP innovation award in 2014 and an OTC Distinguished Achievement Award in 2015 and has been selected by Petrobras; the all-electric eICV flow control valve, eSSV subsurface safety valve and eSCM subsea control module; the wellnova.ai machine-learning platform for cement quality assessment; the WAA abandonment alert system; the Cyclops subsea hydrocarbon leak and hydrate solution; and FAMES for flare and methane emissions monitoring. Named clients and research partners include Petrobras, Shell, Equinor, Galp, Baker Hughes, Repsol Sinopec Brasil, Ocyan, Prio, ANP, PUC-Rio, USP and SENAI CIMATEC. The company was ranked second among energytech scaleups in Brazil's 100 Open Startups ranking in 2025."