marine-engineering
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Michael G. Johnson
Michael G. Johnson is the founder, president and CTO of Sea Machines Robotics, a Boston company building autonomous control and perception systems for commercial ships and workboats. A Texas A&M marine engineer who spent two decades in offshore oil, heavy-lift ocean transport and salvage at Crowley and TITAN Salvage, Johnson started Sea Machines in 2015 after seeing how avoidable human error was on an Arctic oil-spill response job. In November 2024 he handed the CEO seat to David 'Chip' Wasson and moved into a technology and product role focused on defense and international expansion.
Jess Adkins
Jess Adkins is a Caltech chemical oceanographer turned founder-CEO of Calcarea, a climate-tech startup that bolts a limestone-and-seawater reactor onto cargo ships to scrub up to half their CO2 and lock it away as ocean bicarbonate. After two decades studying how the deep ocean naturally buffers carbon, he spun his lab science out of the garage during COVID to attack shipping's gigatonne-a-year emissions problem at a fraction of the cost of atmospheric capture.
Sampriti Bhattacharyya
Sampriti Bhattacharyya is the founder and CEO of Navier, the company building America's first all-electric hydrofoiling boat. She grew up in Kolkata, India, arrived in the US at 20 with $200, and went on to earn a PhD in mechanical engineering from MIT. After her first venture — Hydroswarm, an underwater drone startup — she co-founded Navier in 2020 with MIT engineer Reo Baird. Their flagship product, the N30, is a 30-foot, eight-passenger electric foiling yacht that glides four feet above the water at 35 knots, runs 10 times more efficiently than gas-powered boats, and delivered its first customer unit in October 2024. Navier's investors include Google co-founder Sergey Brin and Android co-founder Rich Miner.