Portfolio

Meet VATN

January 26th, 2025 | 2 min. read

Rodrigo Prudencio

Rodrigo Prudencio

As the Managing Partner of Propeller, Rodrigo leads investments and guides the fund’s strategy and overall operations. At Propeller, Rodrigo has led investments in Vatn Systems, and two more companies in seafood traceability and processing (to be announced soon). Rodrigo most recently was the co-founder of Amazon’s $2Bn Climate Pledge Fund, and previously ran the four-year Alexa Accelerator. While at Amazon, Rodrigo was responsible for over 40 investments in early stage startups innovating across areas of climate-tech and voice and ambient computer technologies. Earlier in his career, Rodrigo was a partner at Nth Power, the first venture capital fund to focus on energy technology startups, and was later the founder of Shuddle. Rodrigo served as a senior aide to the U.S. Department of State and was a member of the U.S. delegation to the Kyoto Conference of the Parties on Climate Change. He received his MBA from the Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley, and his undergraduate degree from Middlebury College. He bikes more than he drives, likes to fly fish in fresh and saltwater, and he is never shy about sharing his passion for sourdough baking.

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Vatn is developing low-cost, mixed-mission autonomous underwater vessels (AUVs) that accelerate the path to collecting more information from the subsurface ocean environment.

Location: Portsmouth, RI

How we met: Through our network

Propeller theme: Ocean Industrials

Propeller investment stage: Seed

Vatn Systems is a Rhode Island based developer of low-cost Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) that serve both defense and civilian markets. Designed with the ability to carry modular payloads, and guided by a proprietary inertial navigation system, Vatn is already serving customers and demonstrating their capabilities in open water.

  • Why we love the founders – Nelson Mills, and his brother Freddie grew up on the water and have a lifelong connection to the ocean. They were joined at the start of the company by Geoff Manchester who built autonomous surface vessels at Koop. The team builds, iterates, and solves in tough conditions.
  • What's novel about Vatn – Vatn's modular design rides the tailwind of low cost design and manufacturing from other hardware into the development of attritable AUVs. The cost curve they'll ride further down as they execute on defense contracts will push this technology into more civilian applications where the need for AUVs is only growing.
  • Why we're excited about this market – Autonomous, attritable vessels will rapidly replace the work of traditional surface and subsurface vessels at a time when the study, monitoring, and protection of ocean resources and assets is growing more important around the world.
  • How impactful Vatn could be – Civilian and scientific access to low-cost AUVs will enable deployments to not only protect civilian assets such as ports and waterways, but will also enable more vigilance over energy assets in the ocean, and will support fisheries management and monitoring.

Learn more about Vatn Systems at https://www.vatnsystems.com/