Helium
Helium is scarce, non-renewable, and one of the most operationally complex commodities on earth — cryogenic, high-value, and handed between a small set of players at every step. We didn't read about it. We built the system that runs roughly 20% of the world's supply, and in doing so mapped the entire industry.
The Problem
Production runs every day, and every load that doesn't get out the door on time is volume — and money — you don't recover. A single plant carries hundreds to well over a thousand loads a year, and the whole operation lives or dies on getting them scheduled and shipped.
So the same gauntlet runs every month: build a pickup schedule, tell every customer their days, track each container on arrival — hot or cold — and signal when it's ready, then absorb the inevitable churn as loads slip, trailers swap, and plants go down. You carry custody liability the moment a container arrives, so every reading and every dent has to be documented. And underneath all of it, you're pricing contracts and selling spot loads to fetch the highest margin against a market that swings long and short.
Run well, helium is a source of unusual profitability. Run on spreadsheets, email, and the knowledge trapped in a few people's heads, and it becomes the headache that gets dwarfed by the business it's attached to. The operators who win make it the easiest thing they manage.
The Commodity
Helium is extracted as a byproduct of natural gas, purified, liquefied, and shipped in cryogenic ISO containers that must be kept cold and under pressure across thousands of miles. It cannot be manufactured. A single hot container or an unreconciled delivery can mean six-figure exposure. The supply chain that moves it is unforgiving — and unusually small.
That is the counterintuitive truth about helium: for all its complexity, the industry is a bounded, knowable set of roles. Producers. Distributors. Container owners. Carriers. Drivers. End users. Learn how those pieces fit, and you understand the whole market.
The Ecosystem
The helium industry is a finite set of roles that only work when they fit together. Each piece is one player. Brightness marks how they connect: the largest operators run their own sovereign platform — a Cosmos — while carriers, container owners, and drivers plug in through Connect.
Only so many players. Hover a piece to see its role. Brightness marks who runs their own Cosmos, who plugs in via Connect, and where demand begins.
Proven Here
A Fortune 10 energy company brought us in after internal IT and an outside vendor both fell short. The mandate was to model and run trucked-helium logistics end to end. That system has been in daily production for years — tracking every ISO container across every participant in the chain and collapsing month-end reconciliation from days to minutes. The projected ROI on the deployment is $50 million over ten years.
We did not learn helium from a consultant. We learned it by building the software the industry runs on. That is why we can map every role in the chain — we have already modeled each of them in production.
The Helium Library
A Cosmos isn't built from scratch — it's composed from Constellations: proven components imported and then tailored to the operation. These are the core helium constellations in our library — proven in live helium operations and ready to import. A new operator doesn't start at zero. They start here.
Every load tracked from fill request to fill slot, load sheet, BOL, and invoice — 100% traceability from fill to delivery, on any device.
Plan a month against forecast production flow and dewar storage. Drag-and-drop loads, model downtime, and rebalance instantly when the plant runs ahead or behind.
Track every off-take balance and term, then assign each load to the contract that fetches the highest price — manually, or automatically in your favor.
Run controlled spot-load auctions inside the platform: offer volume to selected customers, collect bids on your terms, and assign winners to contracts instantly.
Every ISO tracked with full load history and chain of custody. Owners can authorize other companies to use their containers; view the fleet by arrival date or status.
Capture scale weights, temperature, pressure, and impurity straight from plant systems — including automated midnight weights — and alert the right people the moment an ISO heats or over-pressures.
Generate every invoice from the operational data with a single click. Business rules applied automatically, a full audit trail, PDF export, and optional auto-email to the customer.
Customers self-serve: submit fill requests, view contracts, invoices, and BOLs, and swap an ISO from one fill slot to another — without a single email or phone call.
Role-based access for schedulers, operators, accountants, and customers; single sign-on via OpenID Connect or SAML; and a configurable API for BI tools and ERP integration.
How It Connects
The industry map is also the architecture. Each major operator gets a platform of their own; everyone else connects to it. No single hub — a network of sovereign systems that interoperate.
Cosmos
Producers and major distributors run their own Cosmos — a private, sovereign platform that models their operation and runs it. Not shared software; theirs.
Connect
Container owners, carriers, and drivers plug into the chain through Connect — a shared app for the participants who don't need a platform of their own, but do need to stay in sync.
Nexus
Nexus is the exchange layer where operators publish and discover capabilities and transact across organizational lines — sovereign systems, interoperating on their own terms.
Producer, distributor, container owner, carrier — if you move helium, you already know how hard the coordination is. We've modeled your role in production. Let's talk about your operation.