Kevin Rosa: We're all very familiar with weather forecasts. You would not want to get onto a plane if the pilot didn't know what the weather was going to be along the route. And that weather forecast is generated by a computer weather model.
You can do a very similar thing for the ocean. If a ship wants to get from Newport to Miami, they should know what the currents are going to be and the waves are going to be along the way. And so what Current Lab does is produce forecasts of ocean conditions and then make that data useful for customers.
That's the idea -- basically a weather forecast for the ocean conditions, currents, waves, temperature, etc.
Q: How does your solution work in practice?
Rosa: If I'm a sailor and I've just come to Newport for a big event and I want to know with real detail ... the local knowledge of what the currents are going to be doing, they can pay to use the Current Lab Web app. It's just like a map that has an overlay of proprietary high detail currents and you can see how that's flowing around the islands. And you can click forward hour by hour and see how the direction and the speed is going to change throughout the race course.
On the other end of the spectrum, if I am a company and I'm building ocean drones that sail around ... you can use the Current Lab API, which is a sort of like the technical backend. They can plug their application into our data sets and ... instead of just having to look on a screen, they can send Current Lab forecasts to all of their ocean drones. They can use that to better route them.
Q: When did you think that could be a viable idea?
Rosa: I think it was in 2021 and the US Olympic sailing team had reached out and they said, 'hey, we're having this big problem trying to predict the currents in Tokyo ... We heard from the America's Cup team, [who was my my first customer], we heard that you have this new solution.' And so I was working with them and then getting approached by some other potential customers. And that was when I kind of realized, hey, I think I need to devote my time full time to Current Lab.
Q: What are you currently offering customers?
Rosa: The easy thing is if you are a sailor and you want [to know] the currents for an upcoming race, we offer sort of race packages -- they're called like GRIB files [ocean data packages]. That's a standard way that you can visualize currents on your device or on your computer.
I'm [also] working on a few pilot programs right now with companies who want to plug into our data sets directly ... That would mean, say, a company has an ocean drone and they have a software where you can route the ocean drone around and they would be able to overlay our data onto their software and they would be able to use that to get more energy efficient routes or faster routes. And there could be a lot of different types of use cases like that in shipping, in aquaculture ... It's sort of more of a custom approach.
Q: Is there anyone else doing something similar?
Rosa: A lot of this is done by government groups -- so, the [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] in the US and then there's a European equivalent.
How that works is that they will run some ocean forecast models and then make that data available. There's not really any possibility to go to NOAA and say, 'hi, you have a model of the Chesapeake Bay. Now could you do one of Long Island Sound.' ... It's just sort of what's available is what you get.
With Current Lab, I'm really trying to offer an alternative to that system where you could, as a small company, very easily get access to data right away in sort of a live forecast model.
Q: What are you trying to achieve with Current Lab?
Rosa: My goal would be for Current Lab to become synonymous with a one-stop shop for world class oceanographic data.
There's so much value in having forecasts and, you know, data about the ocean, but it's really scattered and inaccessible and inaccurate right now. And I think you shouldn't have to be an expert to be making use of this data. I think that you should be the expert in what you're doing and you can just kind of offload to our lab and say, 'hey, we just need to know what the temperatures are going to be or what are the currents going to be?' And very easily know that you're getting back the best result.
This interview has been condensed and edited for length and clarity.