A Letter from the Founder

Welcome to Kalopa Robotics.

Our story didn’t start in a corporate boardroom; it started out on the water. My respect for the ocean was hard-earned. In 2009, some friends and I sailed a 41-foot sailboat from Galway to the Caribbean. During that transatlantic crossing, we spent an inordinate amount of time doing running repairs—chasing down fraying lines and chafing halyards. That experience taught me a vital lesson: on a crewed boat, you can catch a small problem before it escalates. An autonomous sailboat doesn’t have anyone on board to fix the small details before they become catastrophic events.

That reality stuck with me. So, when I became fascinated by the Microtransat race - a daunting initiative to send a fully autonomous sailing boat across the Atlantic - I knew exactly what we were up against. What began as a personal challenge to build a small autonomous vessel capable of navigating a local bay quickly evolved into a rigorous, decade-long engineering pursuit.

Combining my background in software engineering with my hands-on experience as a sailing instructor, I had both the technical foundation and the practical maritime knowledge needed to build the control systems. I spent years researching alternative navigation methods and developing robust control systems like KROS (the Kalopa Real-time Operating System), determined to bridge the gap between maritime tradition and cutting-edge robotics. The goal was to build systems that wouldn’t just navigate, but would survive.

Over the last decade, my vision of “robotic sailing” matured. I looked at the ocean data collection market and saw a massive barrier to entry. Gathering persistent, reliable data from the ocean surface required multi-million-euro capital expenditures, massive carbon footprints, and complex logistics. It was locking out brilliant researchers and commercial innovators.

I founded Kalopa Robotics to change that.

Today, that initial prototype has evolved into a sophisticated but small fleet of 2.4m autonomous, wing-sail vessels. We designed them to operate for months at sea, powered entirely by wind and solar, and engineered them to be globally air-freightable. More importantly, we built a business model around them - an “AWS-style” charter system - that completely removes the burden of vessel ownership.

We provide the robust platform, the power, and the telemetry. You provide the payload, and together, we gather the data.

We constantly strive to ensure that every vessel we launch embodies that original spirit of innovation and resilience. Whether you are a commercial enterprise needing persistent environmental monitoring, or a university researcher bidding on unused fleet capacity, we are here to make your mission a reality.

I look forward to seeing what we can discover together.

Dermot Tynan, Founder & CEO, Kalopa Robotics