ocean-robotics
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Akhil Voorakkara Is Building the Ocean Company One Hard Lesson at a Time
The Ulysses co-founder began with a leaking seed-planting prototype, learned what salt water does to confidence, and returned with a broader plan for autonomous work at sea.
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.'