Founder · Whoastra Labs LLC
Woody Straley
Subsea survey party chief. Builder of WoodSolutions.
Woody has spent 22 years offshore on subsea survey spreads — ROV pipeline inspection, construction support, positioning — most of them running the survey office as party chief. Whoastra Labs is what happened when he stopped waiting for the software the job needed and started writing it, on rotation, on the vessel, with AI engineering assistants doing the typing and a party chief doing the thinking.
The result is the WoodSolutions family — a survey DVR, a pipeline progress tracker, a personnel-on-board tracker, a device terminal, a remote desktop and a video broadcaster — WoodPOB and WoodLineTracking in daily service on live jobs, the rest downloadable today — plus a free training platform for the next wave of developers in Southern Louisiana and products built with local businesses. Based in Houma, Louisiana. Building for everywhere.
How he works
Six things that do not change, whichever product it is.
Whoastra Labs is a one-founder studio, and the founder is still offshore for weeks at a time. These are the rules that make that work.
Build it where the problem is
Every Whoastra Labs product started on a real job: a DVR that cost a rack unit and a rental desk, a progress workbook nobody trusted, a POB list on a whiteboard. The fix gets built on the vessel, that rotation, and goes back to the same people the next shift.
Offshore, it runs on your PC
Offshore there is no internet to speak of and no IT department on call, so the WoodSolutions products run on the PC that is already there, keep their data in plain folders you can copy, and never phone home. Installers upgrade in place and never touch the data. Cloud and AI services are used where they belong, by choice: ChairTime, HGDev and the AI assistants that help build all of this.
AI-native, and honest about it
One person ships a DVR, a tracker and a crew system in a season by directing AI engineering assistants the way a party chief directs a spread: the brief, the standards, the checks and the sign-off stay with the human. Every release is tested against real job data before it goes to the vessel.
Published prices, free where it should be free
WoodDVR has a price list on the page and three free days with every feature on. The tools that should be free — the Reviewer, WoodVNC, WoodTerm, WoodVideo Broadcast — are free. Nobody has to ask for a quote to find out what something costs.
Give the next crew a way in
HGDev, the free developer and AI training platform for Southern Louisiana, exists because AI developers are not moving here — so we train them here. Part of what Whoastra Labs earns goes back into that.
Answer the email
Enquiries go straight to the founder and get answered, usually within a day, from the vessel if that is where he is. Bugs found offshore are fixed offshore.
What he has built
Written offshore, tested on real job data.
The WoodSolutions family, each with its own page and downloads — and, on the home page, the rest of what Whoastra Labs ships: GlobeLens, ChairTime and HGDev.