Our Heritage

MTEM started in 1991 when Anton Ziolkowski led a €3M project, funded by a grant from the European Union, to perform the field tests to test the fundamental ideas. Over the next 7 years, two large data sets were collected, but Anton and Bruce and their colleagues could not get the data to confirm their theories. The grant finished in 1998 with no firm conclusion. In 2000, working at the University of Edinburgh, Anton and Bruce took on David Wright as a research student. David spent many months looking at the data and in 2001 solved the problem, and MTEM was born. The three scientists applied for a patent and the idea of starting MTEM as a company took root.

A grant from Scottish Enterprise of £200k enabled Bruce Hobbs and colleagues at the University of Edinburgh to build a set of acquisition boxes to his exact specification, and to go out and acquire more data. The High Growth Unit of Scottish Enterprise advised Anton and Bruce to recruit an experienced manager as CEO, and to appoint lawyers and financial advisors. Leon Walker joined the team as CEO in January 2004. The company subsequently appointed Simmons & Company as lead advisor and DLA as legal advisor on the proposed fundraising. On November 11 the team received funding of £7.4M from a syndicate of venture capitalists made up of Stavanger based Energy Ventures and HitecVision, and Scottish Equity Partners from Glasgow.

In June 2007 it was announced that Petroleum Geo-Services (PGS) had entered into a definitive agreement to acquire MTEM Ltd. The company retained the founding members and staff and operates within the PGS Group under the name of Multi-Transient EM.