Helium
Helium is scarce, non-renewable, cryogenic, and high-value — 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.
The Problem
Production runs every day. Every load that misses its window is volume — and money — you don't recover. A single plant carries hundreds to well over a thousand loads a year.
Every month: build a pickup schedule, tell each customer their days, check each container on arrival — hot or cold — and signal when it's ready. Then absorb the churn as loads slip, trailers swap, and plants go down. Custody liability starts the moment a container arrives, so every reading and every dent gets documented — one hot container or unreconciled delivery can mean six-figure exposure. Underneath it all, you're pricing contracts and selling spot loads into a market that swings long and short.
Run well, helium is unusually profitable. Run on spreadsheets, email, and a few people's memory, it becomes a headache. The operators who win make it the easiest thing they manage.
The Ecosystem
Helium can't be manufactured, and it ships in cryogenic ISO containers that must stay cold and pressurized across thousands of miles. Yet for all that complexity, it moves through a bounded set of roles: producers, distributors, container owners, carriers, drivers, end users. Each piece is one player. Brightness marks how they connect: the largest operators own a Cosmos — their domain model — and run the software Command generates from it; carriers, container owners, and drivers plug in through Connect.
Only so many players. Hover a piece to see its role. Brightness marks who owns 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: model and run trucked-helium logistics end to end. That system has been in daily production for years. The case study has the full story and results.
We didn't learn helium from a consultant. We learned it by building the software — every role in the chain is already modeled in production.
The Helium Library
A Cosmos isn't modeled from scratch. It's composed from Constellations — proven pieces of domain model, tailored to the operation. These core helium constellations are proven in live operations. A new operator starts here, not at zero.
Every load tracked from fill request to fill slot, load sheet, BOL, and invoice — 100% traceability, on any device.
Plan the month against forecast production and dewar storage. Drag loads, model downtime, and rebalance when the plant runs ahead or behind.
Track every off-take balance and term. Assign each load to the contract that fetches the highest price — manually or automatically.
Offer spot 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.
Scale weights, temperature, pressure, and impurity straight from plant systems, including automated midnight weights. Alerts the moment an ISO heats or over-pressures.
Every invoice generated from operational data in one click, with business rules applied, a full audit trail, PDF export, and optional auto-email.
Customers submit fill requests, view contracts, invoices, and BOLs, and swap an ISO between fill slots — no email or phone call.
Role-based access for schedulers, operators, accountants, and customers. SSO via OpenID Connect or SAML. A configurable API for BI and ERP integration.
How It Connects
The industry map is the architecture. Each major operator gets its own platform; everyone else connects to it. No single hub — sovereign systems that interoperate.
Cosmos
Producers and major distributors each own their Cosmos — the model of their operation that Command turns into their software. Theirs, and it goes where they go.
Connect
Container owners, carriers, and drivers plug in through Connect — a shared app for participants who need to stay in sync, not a platform of their own.
Nexus
The exchange layer we're designing, where operators will publish and discover capabilities and transact across organizational lines, on their own terms.
Producer, distributor, container owner, carrier — if you move helium, you know how hard the coordination is. We've modeled your role in production. Let's talk.