News: I've founded a new startup and raised pre-seed funding led by @FirstMarkCap. Meet @piccardscience – Physical AI for ocean robotics. I grew up mesmerized by Jacques Cousteau's underwater explorations. I regularly fall asleep listening to Sir David Attenborough's soothing voice narrating Blue Planet. My wife and I lived in 13 countries by the ocean, surfing and scuba diving. We named our son Kai, which means ocean in Hawaiian. We left our life in New York and moved to Rhode Island, The Ocean State, to raise Kai by the ocean in a small coastal town with a surf culture instead of in the city. And like magic, our personal life choices all of a sudden intersected with my professional path. Over the summer I got invited to teach agentic AI to professors at University of Rhode Island. While preparing, I found out URI was the first institution in the US to establish M.S. and PhD degrees in ocean engineering and today they have one of the top programs in the field. In June, they cut the ribbon on a brand-new ocean robotics lab building as part of a $300M plan for the revitalization of the Narragansett Bay Campus, down the road from our house. The lab is home to research projects I can only describe as... Cool AF. After starting to work with the researchers at the lab, it became clear what needed to happen. The ocean is like space. Full of unknowns and mysteries. Incredible opportunity for exploration. The new advances in AI make it possible to do things that were previously impossible, too expensive or too dangerous. I believe in a big future for autonomous oceans. And so Piccard was born. We'll first focus on the the physical AI involved in building ocean robotics, such as autonomous underwater and surface vehicles. Piccard has big aspirations which I'll reveal in time. When I told my long-time investor @amishjani at FirstMark about it, he immediately saw the potential and led a round that came together in days. Along with long-time supporters who've believed in me and invested in my startups for years. Dustin Dolginow and @anabelpaksoy of 43, @hnada, @mutaharglasgow, @paulsethi, and @smart . So now we start this journey. Why the name? Jacques Piccard, along with U.S. Navy's Don Walsh, was the first person to reach the deepest point in the ocean, the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench, in 1960. He is an inspiration. Piccard also got accepted into NVIDIA's Inception program. We'll be building across the @NVIDIARobotics physical AI stack, and you'll see me share a lot of content about this. Ocean robotics is difficult science. I've become a student again. Taking classes at URI in Underwater Acoustics and Oceanography Data too. If you're intrigued by physical AI and want to understand why Jensen Huang always talks about it, turn on notifications for my posts. I'm sure you'll learn a ton through them. If you're an ocean robotics researcher or a builder of autonomous ocean vehicles, DM me. You'll like what I have for you.