Dolphin Labs is a four-person startup based in Oakland, California that is pushing the boundaries of wave-generated power with a prototype of their key product, the xNode Wave Energy Converter. The xNode is a renewable energy solution geared towards offshore operators that can produce up to 1 kW of persistent power.
In this exclusive interview conducted at 3DEXPERIENCE WORLD in Houston, Texas, Dolphin Labs Chief Engineer Chris Rauch talks about what it took to get the startup’s prototype into the water, the importance of powering remote data systems, and the creative power of SolidWorks and AI.
Devon Verbsky (DV): Give me a rundown of Dolphin Labs, its creation and what’s happening today.
Chris Rauch (CR): Dolphin Labs is a spinoff from a company called Cal Wave Power Technologies.
Cal Wave was founded in 2014. They are working to solve grid scale or utility scale power using wave energy with a good percentage of communities being within whatever their distance is from the shore. With their focus being on grid scale, their customer base is different than what Dolphin Labs does, and the size and scope of their projects are different. We’d love a smaller system that can be used remotely. We don’t need a cable back to the beach. Cal Wave always has a big cable back to the beach. But they have a patent that covers what we call the xNode, which is the key product for Dolphin Labs.
There are two ways to tell us apart from Cal Wave. Cal Wave is 100 kilowatts and above and a cable back to the beach. Dolphin Labs is less than 100 kilowatts and not necessarily a cable. A lot of our applications are fully remote sensing types of applications. What we’re doing at Dolphin really has to do with enabling sensing in remote locations, and what’s great about it is we use renewable power to power these at energy densities that are greater than what you get out of wind and solar.
DV: You’re the chief engineer of Dolphin Labs, but I know you have experience with L3Harris Technologies and the Navy’s MUUV program—and you have a background in both marine and defense instrumentation. How has that previous experience helped you at Dolphin Labs?
CR: I went to school for naval architecture, pursuing an engineering discipline that’s focused on the ocean. Early career work, I was in Hawaii designing boats on the water. I did a lot of test engineering on the water. I left there to join Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution working on autonomous underwater vehicles—robots you’d pre-program to dive to the ocean depths. All of my personal interests and professional experience have now come together as an opportunity presented to team up and join a wave energy conversion company.
DV: What’s the importance of powering data solutions with a platform like xNode?
CR: Dolphin Labs started in 2022 with an emphasis on the customer discovery side. Talking to people in the Navy, both civilian and uniform sides. Talking to people in oil and gas. In those customer discovery interviews, one of the things that was discovered, NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, have this network of buoys around the world that are gathering meteorological data. Most of those buoys, the sensors are only at a 10% duty cycle. They’re on six minutes for every hour. The main reason that happens is because of the amount of power they have on board—they can’t operate any more than that. Now, you don’t necessarily need a 100% duty cycle to be able to predict the weather, but I’ve never met a scientist who doesn’t want more data, so we give them more power to be able to gather more data.
In the case of the Navy or defense, you can see certain things with satellites, which is great looking down, but having a view from the surface, looking out or gathering data underwater, is a whole other problem. It gives you a much different view than a satellite view.
DV: How does SolidWorks benefit you at Dolphin Labs?
CR: Professionally, I’ve been using SolidWorks for 20 years.
SolidWorks allows us a CAD tool that we can do all of our mechanical design in; some level of simulation; and then—with the recent adoption of 3DEXPERIENCE—having our team on both coasts of the U.S., we’re able to do file management in an easy way. I can be working on a file, I can have it checked out; my colleagues on the west coast can come right in and be working on assembly that has that file and they’re not impacted. With 3DEXPERIENCE, you have a PDM solution, but you don’t have to have an on-premise system. You don’t have to worry about firewalls and people at remote locations being able to get into your PDM network.
DV: Do you think the work of Dolphin Labs falls under the same industry trends as Industry 4.0 or even Industry 5.0?
CR: The marine technology space is a low volume, high mix world.
With the xNode, we have this core platform that can produce energy and that can store energy. It has a processor or a capability to do some behaviors. The value is, we can have different customers come to us and say, they have a sensing need. They need to integrate sensors that can do X, Y, and Z, so we will integrate OEM level packages of those sensors. That being said, with the versatility, it’s hard for us to have a fully automated manufacturing line.
DV: What kind of expansion are you looking for or could you potentially expect with Dolphin Labs?
CR: We’re currently four and we have job recs out for two more spots right now.
We are trying to be smart, and I don’t want to say constrain our growth, but be mindful of our growth. We’re taking a very methodical approach, and the marine tech industry is very niched. We do have growth plans, we do have hopes. When we hit a certain revenue level, we expect to have X number of employees, and we have that all mapped out. We are still very much in the prototyping phase.
DV: Would you consider Dolphin Labs at all as a startup?
CR: Absolutely.
The definition I like the most of a startup is “A startup is an organization seeking a repeatable business model.” We right now we have ideas, but until we have customers buying on a repeated level to know what that repeated business model is, we’ll be a startup until then.
DV: So what about your AI impact?
CR: We’re gathering data, and though we haven’t fully implemented this yet because we’re still prototyping, but because of our power levels, we can have edge computing on board. This means that we can have a processor on board that’s processing the data which is great, but then requires more power, which reduces your endurance and how much data you can collect.
Because the xNode is at sea and it won’t be brought up on a ship every day for a data download, we then need to send data back to the beach. By using AI tied in with our edge computing, not only can we then process the data at sea, but then we’re only going to send the data back to the beach that’s of interest. We’ll use AI to help identify those anomalies.
DV: What’s next for Dolphin Labs?
CR: We’re actively working hard right now to get to our first sea trial.
Our first sea trial is planned to be three months, looking to start towards the end of Q3 or beginning of Q4 2025. We are working very hard on a lot of design details, pulling that all together. Our focus is really on getting this thing in the water. It’ll be on the West Coast, California, and we have a couple sites. The West Coast Pacific Ocean has longer period waves, and that’s really important. It makes a lot more sense from a logistical standpoint to build the prototype out there.