We are honored to be featured in the Pittsburgh Business Times for our win at SXSW! Ten startups from across the globe out of 45 finalists were named SXSW Pitch 2026 winners in their respective categories.

Pittsburgh Coastal Energy won the Student Startup Pitch Competition at SXSW! 🎉

This recognition reinforces what we’ve believed from the very beginning. That the future of maritime autonomy will be powered by ocean waves 🌊

As an added bonus, Garry Tan fromY Combinator was the one who presented us with the award! Huge thanks to the judges Justine Juillard, Michael Psarouthakis, Gail Christine Gannon, Akif Malik, and Bryan Liu for the opportunity and great questions!

We are honored to be recognized as one of Technical.ly’s 2026 RealLIST Startups in Pittsburgh!

This list features promising early-stage companies in the region that are making an impact in their respective markets and communities. For us, that means bringing wave power to autonomous marine systems so they can operate independently in the ocean.

Congrats to the other honorees and runners-up!

Pittsburgh Coastal Energy has been selected as 1 of 15 teams to participate in the 2026 Stage 2 cohort of VentureWell’s Ocean Enterprise Accelerator program. We're excited to participate in Stage 2 of the Ocean Enterprise Accelerator alongside these other great startups in the cohort! The next few months will be heavily focused on prototype development and engaging with stakeholders as we continue on our path toward commercialization. 

This week we traveled to Washington Clean Energy Testbeds in Seattle, WA to wrap up our participation in Stage 1 of VentureWell’s Ocean Enterprise Accelerator. During the program we received mentorship from individuals who helped us work towards the next steps of our SERPENT prototype and solidify our business model for powering autonomous underwater vehicles. We are excited to put what we learned into action and plan to apply for Stage 2 of this program. 

Pittsburgh Coastal Energy CEO Priscilla Prem will be presenting at Pittsburgh’s WITCON 2025, speaking about her journey as a hardware entrepreneur. Her session titled “The Grit & Grace of Building a Hardware Startup” focuses on launching Pittsburgh Coastal Energy and navigating the challenges of building a physical product on a bootstrapped budget. This presentation dives into the challenges, creativity, and audacity required to bootstrap a physical product company, along with the unique rewards that come from persistence and vision. 

Pittsburgh Coastal Energy is proud to announce acceptance into VentureWell’s Ocean Enterprise Accelerator Stage 1 Cohort. This program, supported by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), supports the future of coastal innovation through three months of targeted mentorship and virtual sessions, a three-day in-person workshop, and a $15,000 Technology Development and Commercialization award for each company. We are excited to connect with other Blue Economy Innovators and take our technology closer to commercialization. 

We wrapped up our participation in the Defense Tech Accelerator sponsored by the Defense Innovation Unit, Pacific Northwest Defense Coalition, and Defense Innovation OnRamp Hub: Washington. These last 4 months have been a game changer on getting us up to speed on the ins and outs of defense contracting, and introduced us to many partners who will help us with our journey. During the showcase, we pitched our SERPENT (Subsea Energy Recharging Platform Enabled by Nanogenerator Technology) and presented a demo of our nanogenerators in action. We look forward to taking the knowledge and connections we made and applying it to bring much needed operational energy technology to the DoD and beyond.

This Tuesday (7/15), Pittsburgh Coastal Energy will be featured at the highly anticipated Energy and Innovation Summit highlighting Pittsburgh as the next hub for AI and energy innovation. Check out the article by Chloe Jad here.

Pittsburgh Coastal Energy was highlighted in this week’s ‘Our Region’s Business’ on WPXI. We appreciate all the support from the efforts by the Pittsburgh Technology Council, Keystone Space Collaborative, and Parallax to support Data, Robotics, Energy, AI, Manufacturing, and Security (DREAMS) in the Pittsburgh region.

Pittsburgh Coastal Energy is proud to announce our win at the EnergyTech University Prize competition on June 30, 2025. We were among 11 teams chosen for a $20,000 bonus cash prize for our work in Water Power Technologies which is sponsored by eight program offices at the US Dept. of Energy. We're always grateful to the American-Made Challenges for supporting U.S. energy innovation!

Pittsburgh Coastal Energy is featured as one of six start-ups to watch in this article written by Chloe Jad in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette. Read the article here.

Our time with the Anvil Founders Coaching Program (led by The CEO Strategy and InnovatePGH) is coming to a close and we are so grateful for the opportunity to participate. During the final showcase, we spoked to an audience about our PING technology and our plans to power underwater vehicles and other maritime internet of things (IoT). We are excited to see that the program is continuing for a second cohort, and has our full support! 

We had a great time in Boston wrapping up our participation in the Spring 2025 Blueprint cohort. We enjoyed our time visiting The Engine and networking with other Tough Tech founders at the final showcase event. The knowledge and connections we took away from this experience are a great help for building our startup. Until next time, Boston! 

We have incredible news! Pittsburgh Coastal Energy was named a grand prize winner in the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s Innovating Distributed Embedded Energy Prize (InDEEP)! 

For nearly 2 years, we've been developing a brand new type of energy converter, one that can generate electricity from the unlimited energy of ocean waves. Throughout the contest, we had the opportunity to learn from marine energy experts, receive technical feedback on our technology, and engage with other inventors who are building solutions to power the blue economy.   The win comes with a generous $200K cash prize that we will use to further develop our technology and grow our startup. A special thanks to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory for supporting us through this journey! 

Pittsburgh Coastal Energy took home the $25,000 grand prize at this year’s Big Idea Competition at the University of Pittsburgh! Congrats to our team for their amazing work and thank you to the Big Idea Center for supporting our startup! 

We are honored to be selected for the Defense Innovation Unit’s Defense Tech Accelerator! We are just 1 of 8 startup nationally to participate in this program that will provide us an introduction into defense contracting so we can learn how to position our selves for doing business with the Department of Defense. We are excited to see what the next 4 months brings working with the Pacific Northwest Defense Coalition!