Nexterity wants to automate the hard, dangerous part of pipefitting

Lindsey Elliott is big into bolts. At last year’s Bolting Symposium — the 13th annual — she said the highlight was playing “Bolting Bingo” against the many self-proclaimed “torque dorks” who were in the room.

A former engineer and planner at ExxonMobil, Elliott has spent years thinking about how to improve the infrastructure that moves oil, gas, and petrochemicals. Bolts are what she landed on. Specifically, the bolts that connect sections of pipe (technically called “bolted flange joints”). These bolts require hard, physical work to loosen and tighten, and are the source of many pipefitters’ injuries. Like many trade industries, there’s also a labor shortage.

“Those people get really tired when they’re asked to work 12 hours a day for three months in a row,” she told TechCrunch. “I’ve talked to pipefitters across the U.S. across Canada, and just repeatedly have been told North American pipefitting productivity is notoriously low.”

The solution Elliott came up with at her startup Nexterity, which is one of the Startup Battlefield 200 selected to participate in TechCrunch Disrupt, is a remote-controlled robot that can handle this part of the job. It’s the kind of idea that could fundamentally change this particular blue collar job if widely adopted, making the workers safer and more productive.

Think: more dork, less torque.

The robot comes in two main pieces that fit around a pipe. Powered by batteries, the robot can slide across the pipe once it’s attached and quickly loosen and tighten four bolts at a time.

Elliott said Nexterity has developed a few different configurations of the robot to fit different standard pipe sizes, but they’re all small enough to fit in a Pelican case and be carried by a single worker. That makes them easy to deploy to new sites — flexibility that is crucial to Nexterity’s business model of treating the robot like rental construction equipment.

Elliott said she arrived at this particular design as a result of conversations she’s had over the last few years — not just at the Bolting Symposium, but also with members of the Pressure Vessels & Piping Division of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.

“What I learned from the people, the torque dorks per se,” she said, “is that 80% of our pipes are between two to eight inches in diameter, or what they call NPS2 to NPS8. And so when you have that much repeatability, you have a fantastic candidate for automation.”

It’s a pretty straightforward idea, but one that Elliott believes has a lot of upside.

“I think it would shock a lot of people just how big this market is,” she said. “I mean, day to day, most of us don’t think about piping infrastructure, but even water, wastewater, water treatment, food and beverage, mining, nuclear, any kind of green and sustainable manufacturing facility — they all use the same kind of piping.”

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