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Show Notes:
Listen to FII PRIORITY MIAMI 2025 coverage. In this episode, Adam Torres and John Tauriac, Co-Founder & CEO at HydrokinetX, explore how marine energy powers oceanic intelligence and FII PRIORITY MIAMI 2025.
About HydrokinetX
HydrokinetX is revolutionizing ocean observation with its patented platform that delivers unlimited marine energy and continuous environmental insights. By harnessing renewable energy from the natural motion of water, HydrokinetX power converters enable scalable, sustainable power for customizable sensor configurations. This innovation eliminates power constraints, allowing for uninterrupted data capture and edge computing across diverse marine environments—empowering smarter, cleaner, and more connected oceans.
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres, and if you’d like to apply to be a guest in the show, just head on over to mission matters.com and click on be Our Guest to Apply. Alright, today I have John Toyak on the line, and he’s co-founder and CEO over at HydrokinetX .
This interview is being brought to you by, and it’s part of our interview series that we’re doing for the FII Institute as media coverage. And we were out that FII, priority 2025 in Miami recently. And I know John attended that as well. So first off, John, just welcome to the show.
Good to have you here. Thank you Adam. I really appreciate it. Alright, so we got some things to talk about here. We, I definitely wanna get into Oceanic intelligence and I wanna get into what you’re doing at Hydro Kinetics. But first, I mean, you want a global competition on Project 71, which is powered by FII and Wave Global.
Let’s start there man. Congrats and tell me more. Yeah, so Project 71 was a global competition for ocean regeneration. So. We’re not just monitoring the ocean, we’re really trying to repair and regenerate the ocean. Mm-hmm. And so my company, hydro Kinetics, was one of the semi-finalists. Hmm. from different parts of the world.
We pitched to a prestigious board that announced us as the overall winner of Project 71. From there, we were accepted into the Autonomous Venture Studio, which is a prestigious accelerator, and we went through a really strenuous customer discovery program that saw us interviewing and discovering customers from all over the world.
Hmm. And so we spoke to. Coastal engineers. We talk to marine engineers, we talk to scientists. We also talk to Mariners. Mm-hmm. We talked to a whole assortment, the different stakeholders in, the oceanic environment. Mm-hmm. And what we learned from there was the world is all connected.
By water. We’re all connected by this, oceans. So we all have to play a part in the regeneration of our oceans. Hmm. I wanna take one step back here and I don’t wanna assume what is oceanic intelligence? Maybe let’s start there. As, we kind of dig deeper. So when you typically think about artificial intelligence, you think about you think about these big data centers, right? Mm-hmm. That are power hungry and they’re crunching numbers and they’re allowed and they’re, there’s lots of heat. So Oceanic intelligence, intelligence is a subset of artificial intelligence where the power of the ocean is actually powering the devices that we need.
To utilize what we’re calling oi. Mm-hmm. Or Oceanic intelligence. So it’s an edge processing system that actually uses marine energy to power itself and communicate to the larger data centers. Cloud-based data centers would also perform intelligence on board. The platform, which is actually being powered by marine energy, which is continuous in the most abundant form of energy on earth.
Hmm. Talk a little bit more about how marine energy how that powers oceanic intelligence and like what’s involved in that. So you have waves, you have currents, you have temperatures, you have salinity, all of these. All of these physical phenomenons of the ocean can be converted in some type of energy, but the energy is not going to be converted into what we typically think of United States as 120 volts.
When we plug in something at our house, it’s more of milliamps to watts. Mm-hmm. But those milliamps milli watts, I’m sorry to Watts. Continuously are very powerful when you’re trying to, let’s just say charge a battery or do things that you would normally find pretty hard to do out in the middle of the ocean.
Mm-hmm. Power sensors, power small scale devices that are intelligent, that can gather data. That can transmit data and allow us to. Figure out where do we need to concentrate our efforts in regeneration, regenerating the ocean. What coral reef needs our attention, what coastal community needs our attention?
And so marine energy, powering ocean observation equipment is what I call the convergence. And that. Equally to oceanic intelligence or oi Mm. So the, the convergence of marine energy and ocean observation, let’s go further into hydro kinetics and your vision for the company. So, so talk to us, I know we, we started off the conversation talking about, you know about the competition you won and kind of where you’re at at that point.
But talk to us about more of the, rollout and the build and your, vision for the future of this company. Well, I think going through Project 71 really inspired me a lot. Mm-hmm. During the competition we got to hear Ray Dalio, who’s the founder of Ocean X, explain to us how important the oceans were and all the discovery work he was doing with his.
Ocean X vessel. So I said to myself, when if we had a thousand Ocean X vessels doing discovery, when, if we had a million, right? Wow. And so this platform that we’re developing at Hydro Kinetics, I. It’s like a mini Ocean X platform where scientists from all over the world, researchers from all over the world can log into this system.
The system is in the middle of the ocean, and they can do research in real time on these platforms without even leaving their office or their lab. So we imagine that this is a distributed. System of discovery platforms that would be , open to the public, to the public can use. Mm-hmm. To help us figure out how do we, regenerate these oceans within our lifetime, within a certain amount of time.
That’s pretty, that’s pretty amazing. And so as you’re going out and as you’re, you know, having these conversations what are some of the challenges as you wanna build these things and build out this infrastructure? what are some of the, the challenges that you face and maybe what are some of the ideas for overcoming them?
Well, when you think about ocean observation the whole. Thing about o ocean observation is where do we get the power from? Mm-hmm. So if you, if you solve the power problem, you’re gonna solve the data problem. Mm-hmm. Because the limiting factor of information about the ocean is because we can’t power enough sensors to be able to extract that information and then use that information to get insight.
Mm-hmm. We’ve learned enough to solve the power problem and we’re still improving , the designs of our peak kelp marine powered energy converter. We like to call it a solid state energy converter. Mm-hmm. But we’re on the right path. So. As I talked about earlier, the convergence of marine energy with ocean observation gives us an unlimited tool to do exploration.
Mm-hmm. And so if you ask me what the most significant problem really is, it’s the power problem at sea. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Well, John this has been great, like having a show. I wanna get your, what’s next? I mean, what’s next for you? What are the next steps with Hydro Kinetics? So our next step is to develop a platform where users from around the world can log in and do independent research share research, share insights, and deliver value.
In regenerating our oceans. Amazing. And if people are watching or listening to this, and if they want to follow up and learn more, how do they do that? You can go to hydro kinetics.com, you can find us on LinkedIn. we’re always open to chatting with new people, new stakeholders, people who have problems.
We’re here to, we’re here. We’re here for you. And a final question here. So your work with FII and attending the events. I always like to kind of mention this, this is my first year that I’ve attended an FII event or the an FII priority in Miami or just any FI event actually. And I’ve been doing this coverage and as I do it, I just see all these phenomenal people coming together.
I’m just curious, what’s one of your favorite parts of being part of that community and really, and going and supporting the events. I mean, the community is filled with innovators. Mm-hmm. I mean you’re gonna engage with the most innovative people that in the world. These people are very intelligent and they want to use that intelligence to help shape the globe economy.
They want to use the intelligence to improve. State of the world and leave behind a lasting legacy on this planet. So I’m really be, I’m really proud to be a part of it. Amazing. And those will be our final words for the audience, everybody, everybody listening and tuning in. Just to let you know, if you haven’t done it yet be sure to hit the subscribe or follow button.
This is a daily show. Each and every day we’re bringing you new content, new ideas, and hopefully new inspiration to help you along the way on your journey as well. So again, hit that subscribe or follow button. And John, really appreciate you making some time for us and coming on the show. Thank you so much.
Thank you, Adam. I really appreciate it. Thank you.
Let’s chat.