About Us | The VesselAware Story

How it began

It began as an increasing unease for Santiago, navigating the waters off San Diego Bay, often listening to important sounding radio messages such as a Navy warship warning vessels to keep a 5 mile distance from “32 degrees 43 minutes North 117 degrees 27 minutes West” where live fire exercises were being carried out. Wait where, exactly? “Hold on, someone grab the wheel, I have to look on the map to find out where that is. Wait, what were the coordinates again?”

Similar scenarios where radio broadcasts were difficult to process, hard to attend to, or sometimes plainly missed occurred often. Santiago suspected these situations could be a huge safety gap for mariners and began working on a prototype that would eventually become VesselAware.

The opportunity with Generative AI

Results of initial prototypes were disappointing. State of the art AI at the time was unable to reliably make sense of broadcasts and detect things like spoken locations from the often static filled transmissions. Santiago put the project aside and went to Salesforce where he led engineering teams focused on AI. While there, he realized that the new generation of Large Language Models would not only disrupt every major industry but also make VesselAware technologically viable.

Initial market research and end user interviews made it clear that marine radio communications which had not changed much in over 50 years presented a huge gap in maritime safety and security. It was time to jump back into startup mode!

Getting the band back together

Santiago teamed up with Ryan and Shawn (key engineers from a previous startup) to further develop the tech. He also recruited a notable group of advisors including Mary Bridgen, who led sales at a previous startup. As a sailor and former Navy officer, Mary understood the need for VesselAware and was instrumental in honing in on segments of the market that were feeling the most pain with current radio communications technology.

Transforming Marine Radio communications with AI

VesselAware was announced at the 2024 NMEA conference where we hosted a panel on the future of AI in the marine electronics industry. In November 2024, we delivered a public beta version of the VesselAware mobile app. Momentum with potential customers has accelerated rapidly and we are poised to bring VesselAware to a number of market segments across Government, Commercial and Recreational sectors in 2025.