ocean-data
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Joe Wolfel
Joe Wolfel is the co-founder and CEO of Terradepth, a Cedar Park, Texas company building an ocean data ecosystem that pairs autonomous underwater robots with a cloud platform to turn fragmented subsea readings into decision-ready intelligence for commercial and government customers. A U.S. Naval Academy graduate and former Navy SEAL, Wolfel started the company in 2018 with fellow SEAL Judson Kauffman after concluding that humanity's ignorance of the ocean was a solvable data problem. He frames Terradepth less as a robotics maker and more as an 'Ocean Operating System,' shifting the maritime industry from buying platforms to buying the intelligence those platforms generate.
Kevin Decker
Kevin Decker is the CEO of Ocean Aero, the Gulfport, Mississippi company that builds the TRITON - the world's only autonomous vehicle that both sails the surface on wind and solar power and dives beneath it. A 16-year GE veteran brought in at the end of 2020 to turn a Navy-veteran R&D shop into a commercial defense manufacturer, Decker moved the whole operation from San Diego to the Gulf Coast and opened a 63,000-square-foot factory. He is now steering Ocean Aero from handcrafted prototypes toward AI-driven fleets deployed by the U.S. Department of Defense, Homeland Security, NOAA, and offshore energy firms.
Ravi Pappu
Ravi Pappu is the founder and CEO of Apeiron Labs, a Cambridge, Massachusetts startup building low-cost autonomous robots that drift through the water column to measure the ocean at a scale never attempted. A physicist-turned-serial-founder, he invented Physical Unclonable Functions during his MIT PhD, co-founded the RFID pioneer ThingMagic (acquired by Trimble), and served as CTO of the CIA-linked venture firm In-Q-Tel before deciding the subsurface ocean was the hardest, most under-measured place on Earth and going after it with hardware he calls 'the CubeSat for the ocean.'