unmanned-vessels
(2)
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.
Rylan Hamilton
Rylan Hamilton is the CEO and co-founder of Blue Water Autonomy, a Boston defense-tech company building large, software-defined, uncrewed ships for the U.S. Navy. A Navy surface warfare officer turned robotics entrepreneur, he was an early leader at Kiva Systems (acquired by Amazon for $775M) and co-founded the warehouse-robot maker 6 River Systems (sold to Shopify for $450M). Now he is taking the 'mobile robot' idea back to the ocean - aiming to be the Waymo of the open sea, with a $50M GV-led Series A and a first full-scale autonomous ship slated for the water in 2026.