Piccard
Physical AI for untethered ocean robotics systems.
The founders
BC
The company
Piccard is building physical AI for untethered ocean robotics — the autonomy stack needed to run autonomous underwater and surface vehicles without a tether to a ship or shore. It is developing across NVIDIA's robotics physical-AI stack and working with researchers at the University of Rhode Island's ocean robotics lab.
Physical AI is maturing fast on land, but the ocean remains a largely untethered frontier where GPS fails and comms are thin, so the hard part is on-board autonomy. Piccard is betting that the robotics and simulation tooling now exists to bring that autonomy underwater.
The company is named after Jacques Piccard, who with Don Walsh first reached the Challenger Deep in 1960 — a nod to going deep where few systems can follow. It was founded in 2026 in Rhode Island, next door to URI's Narragansett Bay Campus.
Founder Bora Celik is a serial founder, having previously co-founded concert-pass startup Jukely and founded creator-collaboration platform Subkit. Piccard is also part of NVIDIA's Inception programme, giving it a path into the physical-AI stack it plans to build on.
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