Fifteen technology companies demonstrated undersea capabilities and competed for $200,000 in prizes during the 2025 Blue Technology Innovation Demonstration Event at Naval Undersea Warfare Center Division Newport last month, according to the Navy facility.
The Aug. 28 event at the center’s Narragansett Bay Test Facility and Sail Newport at Fort Adams State Park drew more than 600 attendees and connected innovative businesses with Navy scientists and engineers.
Hosted by NUWC Division Newport’s Northeast Tech Bridge with nonprofit partner 401 Tech Bridge, BlueTIDE focused on monitoring and protecting undersea infrastructure such as telecommunications cables.
More than 60 businesses from eight countries applied for the prize challenge launched in March, including companies from the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Norway, Finland, Greece, Switzerland and India. After a multi-phase selection process, 15 companies advanced to in-water demonstrations.
“This has been an incredible opportunity for industry to showcase technology and innovation to a broad range of government technical experts,” said Division Newport Technical Director Marie Bussiere. “We rely on industry every single day to help deliver these capabilities to the fleet.”
The challenge required companies to collect and analyze information about potential threats to undersea infrastructure and report findings to the Maritime Operations Center. Navy engineers and scientists evaluated technologies including autonomous undersea vehicles, cross-domain communications, high-resolution undersea imaging and various sensors.
Four companies with top-scoring technologies each received $50,000 awards.
“From a warfare center standpoint, this was a great event that showed that we’re working to make NUWC, and the Navy enterprise, more accessible to industry,” said Northeast Tech Bridge Director Julie Kallfelz.
At Sail Newport, Division Newport scientists and engineers viewed demonstrations of emerging technologies that could advance current or future Navy projects.
Kevin Quinn, an engineer in the Sensors and Sonar Systems Department, said the event pushed participants beyond immediate project scope.
“Often it’s the human connection, with the ‘aha!’ in conversation, that causes a breakthrough innovation,” Quinn said. “I had several of those conversations at BlueTIDE that could lead to some real capability necessary for our complex missions ahead.”
Dr. Kaelyn Gamel, a research scientist in the Ranges, Engineering and Analysis Department, studies animal locomotion and biomechanics for robotic technology applications. She examined an autonomous “dog” robot at the event.
“These events help us see what’s out there, where the technology is at and how we can improve on the research end,” Gamel said.
Kallfelz said the event drives economic growth while advancing Navy capabilities.
“It’s in the Navy’s interest to have a booming, thriving Blue Tech economy here,” she said.
NUWC Newport, established in 1869 as the Naval Torpedo Station on Goat Island, is the oldest warfare center in the country. The facility maintains detachments in West Palm Beach, Florida, and Andros Island in the Bahamas, plus test facilities in New York, Florida and Connecticut.
