Gulf Blue Navigator Demo Day

GULFPORT, Miss (WXXV)- 6 startup companies are vying for funding here on the coast, looking to make a strong impact on our blue economy. Demo day at the Lynn Meadows Discovery center put the spotlight on six startup companies, all part of the Southern Miss Gulf Blue Navigator Program. The program’s objective is help relocate businesses to the Mississippi coast.

Kelly Lucas, the Vice President of Research at the University of Southern Mississippi says, really the focus is on blue economy innovation. So, when I say Blue Economy think all things water and maritime.”

Like one company from San Francisco who plans changing the way we diagnose our food we eat from the water.

CEO and founder of Seafood AI says, “seafood AI produces biometric seafood scanners and this is our portal field scanner and you’d put a crab on it and it will instantly tell you whether its legal to keep or not by flashing a red or green light. The technology underneath it is that it takes a weight sample, takes a picture of the top and bottom, does some AI analysis and makes that determination, puts all that data into a database and puts it up to a cloud format so you can start seeing trends and other information regarding the health of the fish we eat.”

And another startup from San Diego who is innovating the way we view life under water.

Jake Johnson from DeepWater Exploration says, “From DeepWater Exploration we manufacturer subsea cameras for maritime robotics and other ocean industries. Our cameras here they range from 400 meters to full ocean depth and about the size of a golf ball.”

DeepWater Exploration also shares how funding will grow their business.

Gwen Butterfield from DeepWater Exploration says “we’re working on our rolling out our software development kit for computer vision applications underwater. So that would be a big help to be able to speed up the development and roll out to commercial industry.”

USM’s vice president of research believes our coast is goldmine for new businesses.

Kelly Lucas says, “This Blue Economy is set to really balloon and the innovation piece in terms of technology advances is really what is causing advances in the increase in the Blue Economy and we think Mississippi has the right to play in the space and we would like to get more companies here in addition to home grown companies who can help us do more things better right.”