offshore-energy
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Robbie Champagne Built the Boat His Industry Kept Putting Off
He started on deck, learned the work underwater, and spent decades earning the judgment to make one expensive decision: build a saturation vessel from the keel up. In 2026, that operator’s path opened into a larger offshore platform.
Garth Sheldon-Coulson
Garth Sheldon-Coulson is the co-founder and CEO of Panthalassa, a Portland, Oregon company building free-floating, wave-powered nodes that generate clean electricity in the open ocean and pair it with onsite AI computing. A Harvard-trained lawyer with an MIT master's and a Bridgewater investing background, he pivoted from finance to spend nearly a decade inventing marine energy hardware. In May 2026 Panthalassa raised a $140M Series B led by Peter Thiel, pushing its valuation near $1 billion, on a bet that the open ocean is one of only three energy sources on Earth with tens of terawatts of untapped capacity.