Built Through Curiosity: How Tiamat Found Its Direction

Oct 13

6 min read

Tiamat Maritime didn’t begin with a perfectly defined business model or a roadmap that told us exactly where the company would go. In many ways, it began much more simply: with curiosity about the maritime domain, emerging technology, and what might be possible when the two came together.

Our CEO, Ben Cohen, describes Tiamat as the product of curiosity, exposure, and a desire to build something difficult for the next 50 years.

During his final years in the Marine Corps, his work with the NavalX SoCal Tech Bridge and the broader defense innovation community gave him exposure to technologies that were changing what people could accomplish in complex operating environments. At the same time, his own interest in the water and the maritime world kept pulling those ideas in a particular direction.

There was no single moment when Tiamat appeared fully formed. Instead, one question led to another, and the possibilities became clearer as we continued to explore them.

What is important to understand, however, is that the company we are building today isn’t exactly the company we originally set out to build. Tiamat has already gone through several pivots, and we expect that process of learning and refinement to continue.

We do not see those changes as evidence that the original idea failed. We see them as evidence that we were willing to listen to what we were learning and allow that knowledge to shape what came next.

Tiamat Maritime team members reviewing operational information during a field deployment on the waterfront in Southeast Alaska.

Where We Started

Our original focus was relatively narrow. We were looking at marine surveying for smaller vessels after conversations with a surveyor highlighted some of the challenges surrounding the survey process, particularly the opportunity to improve how information was managed and how the final product was delivered.

As we spent more time understanding that problem, our attention began to shift from simply improving an existing process to thinking about what else might be possible. We started exploring where uncrewed systems could support survey work and whether humans and machines could work together to improve how information was collected.

From there, the questions naturally became larger. If these systems could support marine surveyors, where else could they be useful? What other parts of the maritime economy were dealing with similar challenges? Could the same principles apply to larger vessels, infrastructure, underwater environments, or other assets where visibility is difficult and reliable information matters?

Those questions pushed Tiamat beyond the original idea. We began thinking less about a single type of marine survey and more about the broader challenge of understanding complex maritime environments. That shift eventually brought together many of the ideas that now define how we think about our work: uncrewed systems, spatial intelligence, repeatable data collection, human judgment, and the ability to understand change over time.

The pivot did not mean the original problem disappeared. In fact, many of the challenges that initially caught our attention are still relevant to what we are building. What changed was our understanding of how broadly those challenges existed and how much more opportunity there was to address them.

Learning When to Pivot

There is a natural temptation when starting a company to become protective of the original idea. You invest time, money, energy, and a great deal of yourself into building something, which can make changing direction feel like admitting that you were wrong.

We have learned to think about it differently because Tiamat is problem-focused, not technology-focused. We are not trying to find places to use a particular drone, underwater vehicle, software platform, or sensor simply because the technology exists. We start by trying to understand the problem, the environment in which it exists, and the people who are already working to solve it. From there, we can determine whether technology has a meaningful role to play and, if it does, which tools are best suited to the work.

That approach makes learning and adaptation a necessary part of how we operate. Every deployment, conversation, partnership, and challenge gives us information that we did not have before. Sometimes that information confirms an assumption, and sometimes it forces us to reconsider one. Both outcomes are valuable because the objective is not to prove that our first idea, or any particular technology, was right. The objective is to understand the problem well enough to develop an approach that creates meaningful value for the people doing the work.

That requires us to ask difficult questions about our own assumptions and, when necessary, change direction based on what we learn.

We can remain committed to solving the problem without becoming attached to one particular solution. If the problem remains the same but new information points us toward a better approach, then adapting is not abandoning the mission.

For Tiamat, learning when to pivot has become less about changing who we are and more about becoming clearer about the problems we are here to solve.

Black-and-white view of a workboat docked on calm coastal waters, surrounded by forested islands and mountains in Southeast Alaska.

Being Comfortable With What We Don't Know

The maritime domain is far too complex for us to pretend that we understand everything about it. The technologies themselves are evolving, the environments in which they operate are unpredictable, and every industry within the broader maritime economy brings its own expertise, requirements, and operational realities.

We are comfortable acknowledging that there are things we don’t know.

Ben learned the importance of that mindset during his early work in the innovation space, when he would enter conversations about unfamiliar technologies or problems and simply acknowledge that he was there to learn. One of the questions that shaped his approach was essentially: If you were in my position trying to understand this, what questions would you ask? Rather than trying to demonstrate expertise he didn’t yet have, he learned to rely on the knowledge of people who had spent years understanding the problem.

That approach has carried into Tiamat. We seek out people who know more than we do, whether they are operators, engineers, surveyors, researchers, technology partners, or people who have spent decades working in the environments we are trying to better understand. We ask questions, listen carefully, and then take what we learn into the field where those ideas can be tested against reality.

Our team has become comfortable operating in that space between what we already understand and what we still need to figure out. Ben describes it as comfortable with being uncomfortable, and that willingness to remain curious has become an important part of how we approach the company.

What It Means to Fail Forward

The idea of “failing forward” can easily become another piece of startup language unless there is something meaningful behind it. For us, it is less about celebrating failure and more about refusing to waste what failure can teach us.

If an assumption proves incorrect, we want to understand why. If a system does not perform the way we expected, we want to know what the environment exposed. If we hear the same concern repeatedly from operators or partners, we need to be willing to examine whether our approach needs to change. The important part is not simply moving past something that did not work. It is carrying the lesson forward so the next decision is better informed than the last one.

Tiamat's operating philosophy is intentionally built around being adaptive, but controlled. We want to remain flexible enough to learn while disciplined enough to understand why we are making a change.

Getting Really Good at the Basics

For all of the long-term possibilities surrounding Tiamat, our focus over the next several years is deliberately practical. We want to get very good at the fundamentals of the work in front of us.

That means continuing to build our capabilities in hydrographic, bathymetric, and aerial survey work while strengthening the spatial mapping component that connects those efforts. It means learning how to deploy uncrewed systems reliably in Alaska and the Pacific Northwest, where remote locations, difficult weather, limited access, and constantly changing conditions leave very little room for weak processes.

Before we attempt to solve every problem in the maritime domain, we want to develop the experience and operational discipline necessary to execute the fundamentals extremely well.

Over time, repeatable information allows us to move beyond isolated observations and begin understanding change. A survey tells us what was there at a particular moment, but consistent information collected over time can begin to tell us what is changing, why it matters, and where attention may be needed next. That is where data begins to become useful intelligence.

It is also where the company we are building today begins to connect back to the curiosity that started it.

Still Curious

There is an enormous amount about the maritime domain that remains difficult to see and difficult to understand, particularly beneath the surface. That unknown is part of what drew us here in the first place.

We don’t know exactly what Tiamat will look like ten years from now, and we don’t think pretending otherwise would make us a stronger company. What matters more is knowing how we intend to move forward: remain curious, ask better questions, seek expertise when we do not have it ourselves, test our assumptions in real operating environments, learn from what works and what does not, solve real problems for real humans, and be willing to change when what we learn demands it.

Tiamat did not emerge from one perfect idea. It has been shaped through conversations, questions, deployments, partnerships, mistakes, pivots, and an evolving understanding of the problems we want to help solve.

For a company built around reducing uncertainty, perhaps it is fitting that our own path has required us to become comfortable operating within it. We are still learning. We are still asking questions. We are still refining what Tiamat can become, and we are still curious.