Altira Group LLC has sold its Houston-based portfolio company ThoughtTrace Inc. to Thomson Reuters for an undisclosed amount, according to a May 10 release from the Denver-based venture capital firm.

“I want to congratulate ThoughtTrace CEO Nick Vandivere and his talented team for elevating their innovative AI software into an extremely valuable multi-industry platform that provides indispensable business intelligence to users across the economy,” Sean Ebert, partner at Altira and a member of the ThoughtTrace board of directors, commented in the release.

Originally released in 2017 to help energy companies and legal professionals uncover decision-critical information within complex land and lease contracts, ThoughtTrace has evolved its proprietary software into a multi-discipline platform which is pre-built for specific industries and use cases, including financial services, technology, health care, energy and law.

ThoughtTrace’s proprietary artificial intelligence (AI)-based software platform, originally developed to interpret complex oil and gas contracts, uses AI and machine learning to read thousands of words at once and extract valuable insight from unstructured data buried in large volumes of complex contractual documents. As a result, ThoughtTrace can take thousands of document pages, automatically read them, and accurately interpret paragraph-level meaning at a fraction of the time and with higher accuracy than a human, according to the release.

“Our oil and gas limited partners played a key role in ThoughtTrace’s lifecycle, from due diligence support, rapid adoption of the company’s AI solutions, to providing unique customer input during product development cycles,” Ebert said. “In exchange, our oil and gas partners gained competitive advantage and tangible value capture from being ahead of broader market technology adoption as well as an above market return on capital deployed.”

Altira has been investing in next-generation technology companies in the energy space since 1996. The firm said it partners with a select group of super-independent U.S oil and gas companies who invest in its fund and compress the firm’s portfolio companies’ adoption cycles.

“Altira continues to seek innovators with advantaged technologies and business models that are proven to provide a sustainable competitive advantage to companies in the energy and industrial sectors,” added Altira Principal J.P. Bauman. “Our model enables our portfolio companies to have unique customer access to our oil and gas operating partners, which de-risks and accelerates the entire technology company lifecycle.”

Cooley served as legal counsel for Altira Group and Kastner Gravelle provided legal counsel to ThoughtTrace for the transaction with Thomson Reuters.

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