Dutch startup Helin is pushing the boundaries of industrial energy asset management by giving companies new tools to monitor, optimize and secure remote infrastructure using real-time data and local intelligence. Founded by engineers with deep experience in oil and gas, the company aims to tackle a persistent challenge faced by operators of solar farms, wind turbines, oil rigs and similar installations: fragmented, delayed or inaccessible operational data that hampers efficiency and safety.
Martijn Handels, Helin’s co-founder and chief product officer, says the core problem many large firms encounter is not a lack of data, but rather the absence of a unified system. In his own words:
Many companies with remote assets were and are struggling to centralize data about industrial assets. We can offer them a platform to gather all this information in one place and turn it into real-time insights.
Helin’s technology is built on two main components: a local computer system (like a mini cloud) near the asset, and a cloud platform that enables companies to manage everything remotely. The local system acts as a smart hub, i.e., it runs applications for safety, efficiency, and maintenance, such as AI-powered worker monitoring on an offshore drilling rig or energy-use optimization on a solar farm. Because the data is processed locally, there’s less delay, lower risk of cyberattacks, and less need for expensive internet connections.
The platform is also designed to be flexible and secure. It can run on anything from a small computer board such as a Raspberry Pi to a powerful GPU cluster, and it supports a wide range of industrial languages and protocols. This means companies can use Helin to connect different types of equipment, automate tasks, and even update software remotely, all while keeping their data safe and under control. In short, Helin turns “dumb” industrial assets into smart, connected, and efficient ones.
“Some of our customers deploy our platform as a safety layer on offshore rigs, monitoring activity on the drill floor,” explained Handels. “Through one of the systems we built, they can detect if workers are in an area where they shouldn’t be, making the alarm go off… Instead of simply turning them down, we saw that some of our customers reroute the electricity they don’t put into the market to storage systems, or offer their employees free charging for their electric cars.”
Taken together, these use cases reflect Helin’s clear focus on vision-based intelligence. Headquartered in Rijswijk, the startup treats cameras not simply as recording devices but as high-fidelity sensors, using AI to convert individual pixels into time-series data that can inform real-time decisions.
As Handels succinctly puts it, “We like the camera, but we like the pixel better.” By processing video streams with minimal latency and fusing visual insights with other operational data, Helin’s platform allows industrial operators to react instantly to on-site conditions, strengthening safety, sharpening efficiency and delivering a more complete, actionable view of how complex energy assets actually perform in the real world.
