Aikido Technologies

A few weeks ago, our CEO Sam Kanner donned a suit and attended Breakthrough Energy's Summit in London. He was able to show off the latest 3D model (shout-out Albert Que!) and share Aikido's vision with some of the leading executives from the energy industry, including Barbara Humpton of Siemens, Ignacio Sanchez Alan, Executive Chairman of Iberdrola, Andreas Schell, former CEO of EnBW and others. A group from Enterprise Singapore, including Chuan Teck Lee also stopped by, highlighting the global nature of the floating offshore wind industry and how value can be created across countries and cultures. Thank you to the Breakthrough Energy Fellows team (photo credit: Brenda Haendler!) Abigail Mathieson, Meghan Bader and many others for putting together such a great event and allowing us to share our story. Please check out the reflections of our advisor, Jane Zhang on this event, for some great takeaways. https://lnkd.in/grEzZEk6

Our CEO, Sam Kanner, was recently featured on the Switch Podcast, hosted by Baseload Capital with Kristina Hagström-Ilievska and Alexander Helling. They helped us coin our latest sales pitch: the IKEA 'flat pack' for offshore wind! Have a listen! https://lnkd.in/gK-GzHjs

We have closed our Seed Financing, led by Azolla Ventures and joined by Propeller, Cisco Foundation, Sabancı Climate Ventures, Anthropocene Ventures and others. This represents the first equity investment in the company and a huge milestone for us and the industry. You can read more about the round in the Axios article (behind paywall, just need email address). We are so thrilled to find such like-minded investors who are just as motivated as we are in deploying transformational technology to decarbonize the grid. Offshore wind is requirement for a net zero world and we need to build more, faster and at a lower cost, as quickly as possible. We are going to show the world how it can be done with the Aikido One pilot this year. With these funds, we'll be able to develop our next pilot project: the Aikido Two, an offshore, operational pilot, which will demonstrate the entire lifecycle of our technology.

Today, we announce the beginning of construction of the largest floating wind platform in the US. This project will combine California's entrepreneurial spirit with some Cajun ingenuity to produce the world's first upending semi-submersible platform. Morrison Energy will be building the Aikido One platform at their yard in Harvey, Louisiana. The demonstration of this project will prove two key aspects of the Aikido Platform technology: performing final assembly in 1/3 of the space and in 1/2 of the time. Stay tuned for more pictures of construction and testing later this summer!

Last week we were thrilled to host members from the California Energy Commission, California Public Utilities Commission and the Port of San Francisco to our offices in the Mission. We found out that Chair David Hochschild, grew up just a few blocks from our offices and we were able to explain the benefits of our disruptive floating wind technologies. All of us are aligned on making California, and specifically the Bay Area, a hub for floating wind! Good luck to all the companies submitting their Phase 2 FLOWIN submissions today to U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)-- all the work we have done will accelerate the U.S. industry greatly, no matter the outcome.

We are immensely grateful to have the privilege of working with Jane Zhang as part of the Breakthrough Energy fellowship. Her experience, acumen and network have helped accelerate our technical and commercial progress tremendously. She shares her experience in the latest article on Cipher: https://lnkd.in/eE682-va We, too, share the vision of traveling out to a floating wind farm full of Aikido's technologies. Let's build it!

Today, Breakthrough Energy released the 2023 State of the Transition report, in which founder Bill Gates shares a snapshot of clean energy innovation and what’s needed to reach a clean energy future. We are mentioned alongside climate-tech companies already working at a scale we are aiming for: Antora Energy, Malta Inc and Fervo Energy. We are all working on technology to remove the cost and logistical hurdles that bottleneck the deployment of massive amounts of renewable energy. In next year's report, we can't wait to put in pictures of real steel and our technology at work. Stay tuned for more details! Thank you Ashley Grosh for doing an awesome job explaining what we do! (Hover over the Aikido text to bring up her video) https://lnkd.in/gYh_BHtC (Five Grand Challenges -> Electricity)

We're thrilled to have been featured in Fast Company's Start Run Grow series. Thank you Adele Peters for speaking with us and sharing our vision! https://lnkd.in/dwkz2Mwy

🌊 Exciting news in the world of (offshore) renewable energy! 👏 🌎 Aikido Technologies is revolutionizing offshore wind energy with its innovative floating wind turbine design. 🌬️ Their pop-up turbines, tested in the Netherlands, promise to make offshore wind deployment quicker and more accessible, even in deep waters. Aikido's space-saving, cost-efficient approach could be a game-changer in meeting clean energy goals. 🌊💡 #RenewableEnergy #Innovation #CleanTech #WindPower

We recently hosted members from California Energy Commission, Brightline Defense, Innovation Norway, Offshore Wind California and others to our testing facility to see first-hand our technology and to talk about #floatingwind in California. We then traveled to the Port of San Francisco and see some areas that can be 'unlocked' by our technology, simplifying project logistics and creating the most value for Bay Area communities. Thank you to our sister companies, Gradient and Otherlab for helping us host these VIPs! We have an exciting project in the works, stay tuned for more info!