Tocaro Blue, a startup building a maritime navigational system, set up shop at the St. Petersburg Maritime and Defense Tech Hub in November.
The company was founded in Pensacola, and the new St. Pete office will function as a secondary headquarters for the company. It moved to the Tampa Bay area in early November — after having an informal presence in the area since 2020 — and it plans to use the new access to nearby organizations, businesses and people to scale the company.
It's a logical secondary headquarters, Tristan Rizzi, the company's president, told Tampa Bay Inno.
"We have recognized that the Hub has a lot of maritime-focused technologies and innovators, and we believe that we fit in very well with what they're doing at the Hub and how they're providing the networking," Rizzi said.
The company plans to attract more customers, contracts and partnerships with the local industries here, Rizzi said.
"As we started to develop, the owner recognized the fact that the Clearwater, Tampa, Sarasota area is a huge hub for maritime, from boat building to boat fixing to engineering, so we're leveraging that," Rizzi said.
Tocaro Blue was founded in 2019 by Tom Patterson, a longtime investor, entrepreneur and sailor. It has 18 employees, and the leadership team, Patterson and Rizzi, are locally based.
The company makes situational awareness technology that uses sensor data, radar and artificial intelligence to digitize a boat's surroundings. It's a developing version of autonomous navigation technology, Rizzi said.
Launched in September, its patented platform named Proteus uses radar information and artificial intelligence to analyze and classify "above and below" the water of a passing boat, Rizzi said.
On Nov. 2, the company acquired Birmingham, Alabama-based engineering consulting company Moxie IoT for an undisclosed amount. It closed a Series A funding round for an undisclosed amount in 2023. A Securities and Exchange Commission filing from July records a raise of $750,000 from seven investors.
