Ocean Startup Spotlight: Tini Scientific’s Vision for Local, Accurate Ocean Forecasts

Tini Scientific has a vision for improving ocean information—crowdsourcing highly localized data from smart watch sensors to tell people exactly how the water conditions are at their favorite beaches.

Smart watches come with a myriad of built-in sensors that can measure temperature, depth, location, and movement. Tini Scientific’s two-woman team of Kim Martini and Virginia Schutte, who have backgrounds in ocean sensors and scientific communications, are building an app that can translate this data into additional measures including wave height, wave period, and currents.

Tini Scientific’s co-founders hope their app will give ocean recreationalists information that is as accurate as possible—allowing them to enter the water safely. Currently, popular wave and ocean condition apps rely on various weather models and buoy sensors to create forecasts. This can result in variable forecasting accuracy, because each beach has its own unique characteristics that can impact wave conditions. Inaccurate forecasts can mean anything from disappointment for surfers who made the drive to a certain beach anticipating waves, to unexpectedly hazardous conditions for fishers and swimmers who expected calm conditions. Tini Scientific envisions itself as a piece of the ocean data puzzle that could help solve this problem—filling current data gaps with hyperlocal, real-time data. 

The app has already received interest from open water swimmers, and is currently being tested by a cohort of swimmers and divers. But, as it grows, Tini Scientific could potentially be utilized for applications beyond recreation—for markets including local governing bodies and Naval intelligence officers.

This past summer, Tini Scientific participated in Ignite22, a blue tech showcase at the AltaSea campus. The event, hosted by AltaSea tenant and key partner Braid Theory, enabled over a hundred blue economy startups and entrepreneurs to exhibit and demonstrate their technology while networking with investors and industry leaders.

Tini Scientific intends to keep building momentum, with plans to spend most of 2026 working with tester data and officially launch the app in 2027. If you are interested in becoming a beta tester for the app, you can contact Tini Scientific here.