- Leads SmartSail as CEO: the company’s vision, product and go-to-market
- Flight test engineer on safety-critical autonomous systems
- National Test Pilot School graduate
- Named Startup San Diego’s Member of the Month, July 2026
- Sailor since childhood; competed nationally in junior sailing
Investor briefingInvestor briefing · SmartSail, Inc.
We’re building the world’s most experienced co-captain.
It starts with one chart and one routing engine, live on boaters’ phones today. The same stack is now going into the fleet office and aboard the boat.
- Navigation live
- Fleet in pilot
- HelmLink in beta
- Co-Captain in development
- Registered recreational vessels in the US
- 11.7M
- USCG · Recreational Boating Statistics 2024
- US recreational boating retail spend, 2024
- $55.6B
- NMMA · 2024 Industry Sales by Category and State Report
- Global recreational marine navigation software market, 2025
- $8.2B
- Mordor Intelligence · 7.48% CAGR to $11.8B by 2030
- Maritime tech startups using AI
- 45%
- Flagship Founders · Global Maritime Tech Startup Map 2025 · up from 27.5%
From the founder
I’ve been sailing since I was a kid. I’ve also spent my career as a flight test engineer on safety-critical autonomous systems. I live in both worlds, and the gap between them is striking: aviation has world-class mobile tools for planning, weather, and automation; marine navigation is still stuck on outdated chart plotters, disconnected apps, and manual workflows. There’s no technical reason for that gap. I’m testing Pathr on my own Catalina 38. The same systems-engineering discipline I learned qualifying autonomous aircraft is how we’re closing it.
Lucas WrightFounder & CEO, SmartSail
“SmartSail Giving Boaters Aviation-level Navigation Tools”Read the articleThe thesis
Every modern vertical got an integrated workflow. Boating got a chart.
The chartplotter ran the helm for thirty years, and the apps that followed are chart-shaped: useful, fragmented, interchangeable. The real work still lives in browser tabs, spreadsheets and the captain’s head.
Pathr’s bet is the integrated workflow, built on one chart and one routing engine and shipped one seat at a time.
The strategy
One stack, three seats.
We are not building four companies. We built one stack, and we take it to one seat at a time. Each step reuses what is already built and adds only what it needs.
04 · The intelligence on top
Co-Captain
In developmentWill reason across all three seats: the chart, the routes, the traffic, the weather and the boat.
01 · The boater’s phone
Pathr Navigation
LiveRoutes planned for your boat, and charts that work with no signal.
- Reuses
- Public NOAA chart data, AIS and weather.
- Adds
- The stack itself, and a free app for iPhone and Android.
02 · The operator’s office
Pathr Fleet
Pilot programEvery boat in a rental, charter, club or school fleet on one chart.
- Reuses
- The chart, the routing engine and HelmLink hardware (in beta testing).
- Adds
- The fleet dashboard and route dispatch, with cellular tracking next.
03 · The boat
HelmLink
In beta testingA small hardware bridge to the boat’s own NMEA 2000 network. Steering in testing.
More on HelmLink- Reuses
- The same HelmLink hardware as Pathr Fleet, and the routing engine.
- Adds
- The owner’s own instruments in the Pathr app, for beta testers now. Steering on Raymarine Evolution autopilots, in testing.
The Pathr stack · Built once
Under every seat
The chart and data backbone
Official NOAA chart data in Pathr’s own chart, usable with no signal.
The routing engine
Depth-aware routes, planned around each boat’s draft.
Live AIS and weather
Traffic, wind, waves and radar on the same chart.
The vessel profile
Each boat’s draft and beam, and through HelmLink, its own instruments.
Why it matters: Pathr owns its chart and its routing engine, so each new seat starts most of the way built.
Book a 30-min meetingThe boater’s phone, Pathr Navigation
LiveThe first seat is live.
Pathr Navigation is free on iPhone and Android: the chart, your position and the anchor alarm. Premium, free for two months for new users, adds automatic route planning, radar, AIS, trip history and more.
Your vessels
Sea Spirit
- Draft
- 5.9 ft
- Beam
- 11.5 ft
From the Pathr app: an active route, live AIS and the boat it was planned for
Depth-aware routingPremium
Planned around your boat’s draft. Plan it with a connection, follow it with none.
Official NOAA chart data
Soundings, contours and buoys, on charts that work offline.
Live AIS trafficPremium
The ships around you with name, speed and heading, plus collision details.
Anchor watch
Set a radius when you anchor. If the anchor drags, Pathr sounds an alarm.
Marine weatherPremium radar
Wind, waves and radar on the chart, and a forecast for the week ahead.
Your boat, your trips
The active boat is used for every route you plan. Every trip is recorded, and Premium lets you look back at all of them.
Try it yourself
The operator’s office, Pathr Fleet
Pilot programEvery boat in a fleet, on one chart.
Fleet operations software for boat rental and charter operators, boat clubs and sailing schools: where every boat is, who is running late and what needs attention, read from each boat’s own instruments by a HelmLink on board.
- Overdue alerts
- Trip playback
- Engine hours without logbooks
- Maintenance before the next charter
- Route dispatch
fleet.getpathr.com/demo
Why fleets come second
- 01They already pay for software.
- 02Every boat they run gets a HelmLink.
- 03One customer, many boats.
The 60-day Pathr Fleet Pilot
Pricing on a call
- Up to five boats
- HelmLink hardware
- Cellular tracking
- The dashboard and onboarding
Open to a small number of rental and charter operators. Units in the field upload their readings over Wi-Fi today, and every unit will ship with a cellular modem, pilot units included. Booking software integrations are planned.
The intelligence on top, Co-Captain
In developmentIt won’t guess the boat. It will read it.
Co-Captain is the AI co-pilot we’re building on top of the stack. It will reason on the data Pathr already runs: the chart, the routing engine, AIS traffic, the weather and your vessel profile.
Not ChatGPT for boating. Co-pilot, not autopilot. You’re still the captain.
The night before
Will brief you before you cast off.
The forecast read against your boat, your route and your experience.
Underway
Will watch what you can’t.
Traffic closing from your blind side, wind backing, a shoal near your next turn.
When the plan changes
Will re-plan with you, not at you.
A different anchorage or an earlier turn, with the tradeoffs spelled out. You decide.
Back at the slip
Will look after the boat between trips.
Engine hours, oil and batteries, with what’s due flagged early.
Pathr Co-CaptainSample
When the plan changes · Saturday, 3:08 PM
“Wind backed southwest earlier than forecast, so your planned anchorage will be a lee shore by 6 PM. I’d move 0.6 nm north into the cove: same depth, sand bottom, good holding. Want me to re-plan the route?”
- Forecast
- Chart
- Your route
Illustrative samples. Co-Captain is in development and not available yet.
The flywheel
Every trip feeds the stack.
Public chart data is the same for everyone. What no chart has is how boats are actually used. Every Pathr trip and every fleet boat on a HelmLink adds that, boat by boat, and it is what will make the routing sharper and Co-Captain possible.
The Pathr stack
01
Trips
Boaters log trips in Pathr. In Pathr Fleet, every boat carries a HelmLink.
02
Data
The routes boats really take, the conditions they meet, the hours their engines run.
03
A sharper stack
Better routes and alerts, and the context Co-Captain will need.
04
More boats
Sharper tools bring more boaters, and more fleets.
01
Trips
Boaters log trips in Pathr. In Pathr Fleet, every boat carries a HelmLink.
02
Data
The routes boats really take, the conditions they meet, the hours their engines run.
03
A sharper stack
Better routes and alerts, and the context Co-Captain will need.
04
More boats
Sharper tools bring more boaters, and more fleets.
And back to trips, with a sharper stack.
Why now
Three inflections. One window.
01 · The customer
Boating’s app-native moment.
A weekend trip still runs on a chartplotter, weather sites and four or five apps. The owners buying boats now expect software that works like everything else on their phone.
02 · The AI
Vertical agents finally work.
Models can now reason over a vessel profile, live traffic, a forecast and a route at the same time.
03 · The data
Marine data is finally queryable.
NOAA charts, depth data, live AIS and satellite weather are now public and cheap to ingest. Turning them into depth-aware routes planned around each boat’s draft is the hard part, and that is the engine we built.
The window
The money went to bookings. The water is still open.
In December 2025 two of the largest peer-to-peer boat rental marketplaces announced a merger, with more than half a billion dollars in bookings between them to date. In June 2026 a growth equity firm made a strategic investment in a major US marina booking platform. Both bets decide who books the slip and who rents the boat.
- Before the lines come off
- Marina booking, rental marketplaces
- Money moved
- Once the lines come off
- The owner’s navigation, the boat’s data, the operator’s live fleet
- Pathr
That second row is the layer Pathr builds.
The team
Three founders. The stack needs all three.
Safety-critical flight test, geospatial and cloud systems at commercial scale, and product development from concept to commercialization. Based in San Diego, on the water we chart.
Software, Systems, Scale
- Founding engineer at an automation startup acquired by a $1B+ technology company
- Full-stack geospatial engineer and IoT systems architect
- Built remote-control hardware and cloud systems at commercial scale
Will Gwinn
Co-founder
Hardware, Strategy, User experience
- Award-winning product developer, from concept to commercialization
- Rapid and frugal prototyping expert
- Pre-Series startup experience
Investor briefing
The world’s most experienced co-captain, one seat at a time.
We’re meeting with the operators, partners and investors building the next decade of marine software. Thirty minutes on Lucas’s calendar, no deck required.
Prefer email? team@smartsail.ai