Hello Ocean Friends,

I’ve been doing a little consulting for Newlab, and through that have gotten to know Geoff Douglass from Mythos AI. He is refreshingly direct and wildly passionate about the potential of maritime automation. We had a great chat, I hope you enjoy it.

Best,
Will

People-to-know: Geoff Douglass from Mythos AI

Will: Thanks for taking the time. First, who are you? What's your company? What do you do?

Geoff: My name is Geoff Douglass. I'm the CEO of Mythos AI. We are automating all things maritime vessels, like navigation. We're creating the next generation self-driving vessels, systems that aid in navigation so that we can increase the efficiency and safety of moving goods and people around the globe.

Will: Very cool. So, look into a crystal ball, read some tea leaves, where's Mythos AI in five, ten, twenty years?

Geoff: Mythos is on thousands of ships. Our tech stack will be aiding in navigation; learning from master captains all over the globe. And certainly within that time, with our current commitments and traction, we will be well on our way to having full-blown autonomous vessels moving goods up and down at least the Mississippi River, if not ports around the U.S.

We'll be completely automating the movements of vessel-based goods and cargo. That's on the commercial side. On the defense side by that time, there will be thousands of vessels operating around the globe with capabilities from Mythos AI.

Will: With what Mythos AI does, what's the problem statement? What's the value that you bring into the world?

Geoff: The real pain point, if you look at commercial shipping, is there's really a massive workforce shortage. You can boil it down to that. If you ask the shipping companies, what are your top three concerns? Any one of them will tell you that we need to start working on autonomy so that we can start reducing our dependence on crewed vessels. And that's probably the main driver. It's the same driver for DOD. They want to scale the number of vessels they have in the waterway, the amount of unmanned systems to accommodate the fleet. They're currently downsizing the fleet because they depend on a workforce that doesn't exist. Why there's no workforce is because there's this huge skillset associated with safely navigating vessels, especially when things get complicated in the fog and stressful situations and cluttered environments. Our tech specifically is developed to navigate ships and vessels through those really hard and congested areas. So we get on ships, we train the behaviors of master captains, pilots, and seafarers and so that we can augment their navigation of these vessels in really challenging environments.

This will allow the fleet to scale. Right now the fleet wants to scale faster than it is physically capable to, that's really the problem that Mythos is solving. How do you scale all these vessel-borne industries right now? Well, you need to make the boats smart enough so that these companies can scale their operations. And that's what we're doing.

Will: To follow up on that, it sounds to me like there's a sort of a hidden value prop behind the scenes that maybe not as fun to talk about: it's also about safety. If you put somebody who's not properly qualified, you're seeing accidents, mishaps, and incidents in a dangerous environment. So there's also a safety concern there, right?

Geoff: Oh, without a doubt. There was an incident in Europe recently where a tanker and a bulk carrier collided, and there were deaths, just this week (Editor’s note: we recorded this interview three weeks ago). Unfortunately, these incidents happen all the time. But you’re also talking about ships with thousands of tons of chemical products, the impact on the environment is huge.

The systems today can start augmenting what happens on a ship. There's a lot of information and you have to be very skilled to look at a radar blob and understand, is that something I care about? Is that a hazard? Is that a ship? Is that something that's going to hurt me or not? What our systems can do is augment that decision-making for the crew and say, “Hey, this is a thing you need to pay attention to. Here are things you don't need to pay attention to.”

It picks up the slack. It's always on, whereas humans get distracted. That's the real value proposition. Get these things on your ships, these situational awareness systems. They augment and aid in safe navigation today.

Will: For a broad BlueX audience in maritime what's the ask for Mythos AI? What is going to get you to that next milestone that BlueX subscribers might help with? Who are you looking to connect with?

Geoff: We're a dual-use defense and commercial industry company. Commercial is really what we're focused on right now, we're looking to connect with ship owners, ship operators, and pilots’ associations.

We’re always happy to chat with investors interested in dual use, deep tech businesses and autonomy. The sales pipeline is growing pretty rapidly and steadily at this point, which is very cool.

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