Industry Veterans Launch AI Business for Convenience & Fuel
CHARLESTON, S.C. — As the uses for artificial intelligence (AI) continue to grow, convenience and fuel industry veterans are launching a AI software innovation company for the energy industry.
NewTide Development Inc. is exclusively tailored to build solutions that solve the challenges of the convenience and fuel retail markets. Led by Doug Haugh, Vladimir Collak and Brandon Huff, NewTide is the first scalable enterprise agentic AI company to specialize its services within the energy and convenience retail industry, according to a release announcing the launch.
NewTide creates industry focused AI agents that work in a proprietary fashion with customers' current technology to solve supply, trading, logistics, procurement, accounting, merchandising and retail operations challenges.
NewTide has acquired Talentr Solutions, an innovation lab that provides AI solutions for organizations ranging from startups to Fortune 100. Led by Collak, he will assume the CEO role for NewTide. Prior to Collak's role as founder and CEO of Talentr, he was a vice president of engineering for PDI Technologies and previously a coounder and CEO of Ceremity.
Ceremity was acquired by PDI in 2018. He was a member of the Forbes Technology Council.
Haugh serves as founder and chairman and Brandon Huff is chief product officer of NewTide.
"Since 2023 we have been quietly building the foundation, vision and organizational structure for NewTide AI, and are now ready to launch for additional customers. What makes us different is we intimately know the fuels and convenience retail industry and we work securely with customers' existing data and technology to build innovative and cutting-edge AI solutions that will help them solve challenges, reduce costs, add efficiencies and gain a competitive advantage," Haugh said.
Haugh has more than 30 years of executive leadership experience in the oil and gas business. He serves as an independent director at Ergon, is a board director at BioBlend Renewable Resources and chairman of the board for TRUX. Previously, he served as president of Parkland USA.
He was named the Convenience Store News Retailer Executive of the Year in 2022.
Huff is an international technology executive and marketplace product leader with more than 20 years' experience, who previously served as senior vice president of fuel and data products and president of global operations for Titan Cloud Software. Prior to that, he was cofounder and CEO of TrueFill, which was sold to Titan Cloud, and also served as CEO and chairman of SiteFuel.