marine-technology
(3)
Bernardo Herzer learned propane at sea. Then he brought it ashore.
A broken marine engine, a green-painted Culver City workshop and a stubborn question: what if small machines did not need gasoline at all?
Mitch Lee
Mitch Lee is the co-founder and CEO of Arc, the Los Angeles marine-technology company trying to make everything that floats electric. A Bay Area kid raised on the California Delta, he trained as a mechanical engineer at Northwestern, analyzed Apache helicopter rotor blades at Boeing, then spent years in software - founding Penny, which was acquired by Credit Karma - before reuniting with his old Boeing and Northwestern classmate Ryan Cook, a former SpaceX lead engineer, to build electric boats in 2021. Arc has raised more than $150 million, ships its Arc Sport wake boat and Arc Coast center console from a 150,000-square-foot LA factory, and in 2026 pushed into commercial and defense propulsion with a $50M Series C and a $160M tugboat contract for the Port of Los Angeles.
Kortney Opshaug
Kortney Opshaug is an aerospace-engineer-turned-ocean-entrepreneur and the CEO and founder of Blue Ocean Gear, a Sausalito-based startup whose orange-and-yellow Smart Buoys put GPS and sensors on fishing gear so commercial fishers can track, recover, and learn from equipment that would otherwise drift off as 'ghost gear.' With a Stanford PhD in aerospace and two MIT degrees in aeronautics, she spent years on docks listening to fishermen before designing hardware tough enough for the open ocean. Her buoys now ride the waters off Alaska, Nova Scotia, and the Caribbean, backed by NOAA SBIR funding and a Series A round, turning a tool for finding lost traps into a real-time data platform for a more sustainable ocean economy.