How would you explain what your company does to someone outside your industry?

MarineLabs builds and deploys sensors that light up coastlines with real-time data. Our sensors collect high resolution, hyper-local real-time wind, wave, and weather information and forecasts and deliver it on a subscription basis. Port operators, vessel pilots, coastal engineers and others use this data to make smarter, safer decisions. 

Unlike traditional data buoys, which are large, expensive, and hard to deploy—requiring ship time with cranes and multiple crew—our sensor nodes are compact, self-contained, and rapidly deployable. Our customers don’t need to manage deployments, procure or maintain data buoys, or rely on government agencies or apps to fill weather data gaps. They simply subscribe to MarineLabs. 

What inspired you to start this company?

I grew up on Vancouver Island in a family that always supported my curiosity, especially when it came to taking things apart to see how they worked and designing and building things. I spent most of my time designing and building model planes, boats, rockets, and soapbox cars. And when I wasn’t building, I was outside in the ocean.

I studied mechanical engineering at UBC, and at first, I thought I’d go into aerospace, but I realized I wanted my work to have more real-world, immediate impact. That’s what drew me to ocean wave energy. During my PhD at UVic, I got to design and test wave energy converters in labs across Canada and Europe.

After that, I worked in a consulting firm specializing in ocean wave energy. But we kept running into the same issue: we didn’t have good enough data to validate coastal models. So in 2017, I started MarineLabs to solve that problem. We began by building small wave buoy technology and kept refining it, with help from great mentors and colleagues from UVic. 

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Reporter/Author: Emily Edwards, Victoria Tech Journal