Ocean Aero builds the Triton, the world's only autonomous vehicle that both sails on the surface and dives beneath it, powered entirely by sun and wind. Founded by U.S. Navy veterans in 2012 and now headquartered in Gulfport, Mississippi, the company makes long-endurance, crewless ocean robots used by the U.S. Navy and allied partners for surveillance, mine countermeasures, and ocean research, as well as by energy and science customers for seabed mapping and environmental monitoring.
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.'