Aikido Technologies

A special, Thanksgiving-portioned sized shout-out to our small, but mighty team! Thank you all for your dedication and hard work on building technologies to make the world a more livable place.

One the eve of Thanksgiving, we want to send our gratitude to all of our stellar employees, suppliers, vendors and other partners who are helping to make the Aikido One project a smashing success. MORRISON Energy Signet Maritime Corporation Bollinger Shipyards Port Pascagoula Bauer Gear Motor Sunbelt Rentals, Inc. Flexifloat Construction Systems Thanks to Recharge , Windpower Monthly and Bloomberg for covering our project. https://lnkd.in/g2_5bC7r https://lnkd.in/gpbbitBK

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.