HOUSTON, Texas — November 14, 2019 — Data Gumbo Corp., the Houston-based smart contract company building a trusted transactional network for tomorrow’s industrial leaders through GumboNet™, its massively interconnected blockchain network, today announced its expansion into the construction vertical with the hire of Industry Principal Michael Matthews. A construction industry veteran, Matthews will lead the company into this $9 trillion sector, which stands to gain substantial project efficiencies and cost-savings from the use of blockchain technology.
“The construction industry lags far behind other industries in both productivity improvement and technology adoption, resulting in billions of lost value. The way companies come together to execute projects remains essentially the same despite technology’s improvement and we have to make fundamental, disruptive changes to deliver more value,” said Matthews. “Prevailing contracting models and disparate systems greatly limit the movement of information and harden distrust between companies, resulting in up to 30-40 percent of project costs being hidden in transaction burden. I want to fundamentally change our industry by eliminating those costs and the GumboNet platform is a low hurdle, big impact solution that I am excited to bring to construction.”
Matthews comes to Data Gumbo with over 30 years of experience in the construction industry as an owner, a contractor and a consultant. Throughout his career, he has helped transform and lead project organizations to deliver projects safer, faster and at the lowest cost. He was previously Vice President of Strategy & Consulting at Enstoa where he worked on accelerating digital transformations for clients in the buildings and industrial sectors. Prior to this, he was Director at PwC where he oversaw project excellence, organization and technology advisory services across a range of industries, maintaining a focus on the client’s value realization. A seasoned executive, Matthews was the co-founder and managing partner of Blue Marble Risk Solutions and he held senior management positions with Faithful+Gould and Honeywell after starting his career with Texaco. Additionally, he is the current Chair of Upstream, Midstream and Mining Sector Committee for the Construction Industry Institute at The University of Texas at Austin.
Currently, the construction industry lags behind other sectors in both productivity improvement and technology adoption, and blockchain is poised to disrupt and improve capital projects across the value chain. The GumboNet platform enables the automation of contracts by capturing data from existing systems, then using the data to independently validate performance against terms and conditions, and posting the results on an immutable, distributed ledger for approval by the contractual parties. GumboNet directly addresses the industry’s pain points by fostering trust among project stakeholders, establishing a single source of the truth and delivering visibility into productivity, cost, schedule and safety performance.
“Construction is one of the world’s largest industries, but it has clearly fallen behind others in adopting technology and driving efficiency. Michael is a recognized leader in the industry and his vision and experience make him an excellent fit to scale Data Gumbo into the construction sector,” said Andrew Bruce, CEO of Data Gumbo. “The ability to address fragmentation and complexity across the project life cycle will aid Data Gumbo’s mission to deliver a business to business platform that builds trust and removes waste and inefficiency.”
Built initially for upstream drilling and completions in oil & gas, but applicable to a multitude of industrial applications such as construction, GumboNet is offered by subscription, and uniquely frees companies from building and sustaining stand-alone, in-house blockchain solutions.
Data Gumbo is the trusted transactional network for tomorrow’s industrial leaders. Its solution GumboNet™ is a massively interconnected blockchain network that automates smart contracts. Headquartered in Houston, Texas, Data Gumbo has a subsidiary office in Stavanger, Norway. To date, the company has received a $6 million Series A equity funding co-led by Saudi Aramco Energy Ventures, the venture subsidiary of Saudi Aramco, and Equinor Technology Ventures, the venture subsidiary of Equinor, Norway’s leading energy operator. For more information, visit www.datagumbo.com or follow on LinkedIn, @DataGumbo and Facebook.
Media contact
Gina Manassero
Data Gumbo
(512) 553-2387
gmanassero@datagumbo.com