Yachting has just entered its digital transformation — and when you sit on a mountain of data and twenty years of seafaring experience, a stop in Silicon Valley changes how you see the world.
The Turning Point
A year ago, SailADV — the parent company of D.gree — landed at INNOVIT, the Italian Innovation and Culture Hub in the heart of San Francisco. More than a program, INNOVIT is a bridge — a place where Italian innovation meets the Silicon Valley mindset, and where ideas are forced to move faster, think bigger, and design smarter. At the time, Leandro Agro was leading that bridge as Head of Innovation — orchestrating the dialogue between Italian founders and the Valley’s design-driven culture.
In our luggage were ten years of sea trials, terabytes of real data, and an intimate understanding of onboard systems and the work of captains. But also an awareness: the yachting industry moves slowly — driven, or held back, by long-standing habits that have yet to face the digital era and artificial intelligence. It was right there, in Silicon Valley — the AI World Capital — that we understood what it would take to make the leap.
Not just a technological platform, but an industrial product capable of speaking different languages — those of shipyards, captains, owners, and even guests. A few months later, on the pages of Wired, journalist Luca Sordelli interviewed Giovanni Palamà, founder and CEO of SailADV, writing:
“In the yacht-building industry, Italy leads the world in construction capability — yet lags behind in its digital transformation.” – WIRED
A warning, but also a map for preserving Italy’s leadership: connecting craftsmanship with data and AI. Silicon Valley showed us that speed is not only a matter of engines — it’s a matter of method. Iteration, design, collaboration.
For Italian yachting, the time had come to change pace: what is born in shipyards must now speak the language of AI and data. That’s how we found our new unit of measure: velocity.
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From Data to Experience
D.gree was born at sea — among sensors, tests, and algorithms. A deterministic AI — refined after over a hundred yacht installations — designed to connect every onboard system and turn complexity into awareness. But the encounter with Silicon Valley changed both our focus and rhythm.
We began to look at software the way we look at an engine: with precision, but also with vision, usability, and functional beauty. As Giovanni Palamà, a fellow citizen of Galileo Galilei, likes to recall: “If you can measure it, you can improve it.”
And he adds: “Innovation today isn’t only in measurement — it’s in how data becomes intelligence. At sea, in real time. Not as a statistic after the fact.”
Alongside engineering, product design entered D.gree — a language that merges AI, sensing, and interfaces, making technology readable and human. We redesigned workflows, alert logic, and the way people navigate across systems and roles.
From the universal secure login to adaptive interfaces on tablets and smartwatches, every element today is designed for one purpose: to turn complexity into trust. And trust is becoming the new benchmark of innovation.
“The growing demand for remote access and real-time interaction with onboard assets has become a defining requirement. Owners and fleet managers no longer accept passive monitoring or delayed data analysis; their sense of ownership and operational control now depends on the ability to interact directly with selected subsystems.”
Extending control beyond the vessel’s perimeter introduces new layers of cybersecurity risk — and this is precisely why D.gree’s architecture is secure-by-design. In our vision, security is not a barrier but a functional enabler: the condition that allows autonomy, remote control, and trust to coexist in one intelligent maritime ecosystem.
Design is no longer a surface — it’s a logic.
As Steve Jobs said, “Design is how it works.”
At D.gree, it starts from foundational data collected onboard, builds a layer of deterministic AI, and translates it into natural interaction through local AI agents and small language models.
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Our Shipyard in Palo Alto
From that encounter with Silicon Valley — and from the INNOVIT ecosystem that first connected us to it — a permanent axis was born, linking the SailADV labs in Italy and the D.gree hub in Palo Alto. Two ends of the same route — connected by curiosity and precision.
On one side, the sea and its rules: precision, discipline, experience. On the other, the speed of system thinking, continuous prototyping, and the courage to experiment. “Design is the bridge between human and artificial intelligence,” explains Agro, now Chief Product Officer at D.gree.
Today, every new feature is born from a cycle of co-design between Italian and American teams.
We call it a Wave — our unit of design velocity.
But it’s not a blind race for features: it’s the result of interviews, field tests, and direct collaboration with shipyards and captains. This process cuts down on unnecessary iterations and lowers the overall cost of innovation. For D.gree, true scalability doesn’t come from infrastructure alone.
It comes from methodology — from design thinking applied to stakeholder mapping, iterative waves, and a human-centered growth model that allows the platform to evolve in harmony with real maritime operations.
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Design to Accelerate: A New Course for the Industry
Adopting design as a method for research, experience definition, and prototyping has dramatically reduced the distance between complex deterministic AI and its users. But more than that — a design-first approach has shortened development cycles, reduced rework, and increased perceived quality onboard. This velocity matters, especially now.
Yachting is entering its Perfect Storm: new digital-minded owners, growing system complexity, and increasing pressure for efficiency and sustainability.
As Wired wrote:
“The future of yachting won’t come from code, but from people of the sea who learn to speak the language of algorithms — and from engineers who learn to listen like captains.”
That’s exactly where D.gree operates: where the precision of maritime measurement meets the velocity of Silicon Valley’s software industry. Where design stops being aesthetic — and becomes the most pragmatic form of human intelligence.
When multiple players work together on the same infrastructure — shipyards, captains, owners, fleet managers — shared languages and real interoperability emerge — the foundation of a future industrial standard for autonomy at sea.
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Conclusions: One Year Later
A year after INNOVIT, D.gree returned to San Francisco — not just to tell its story, but to give something back to the ecosystem that sparked its transformation.
This time, on stage.
Leandro Agro opened the design session of the Hardware & Robotics program, sharing how a startup born from the sea became an industrial intelligence platform. In a way, it felt like bringing INNOVIT full circle — its own vision of design-led acceleration now embodied in the evolution of D.gree.
From the audience to the stage, from data to design, we learned that velocity is not just about software — it’s about research and culture. Research turns experience into method, and method into value.
Culture decides how fast an industry can evolve. The culture of design and the logic of velocity have not only redefined D.gree — they are rewriting yachting.
One year later, D.gree doesn’t run to be first in the classroom.
It runs to bring an entire industry forward.
But the first year is just the first loop of a longer regatta — a circuit where every iteration sharpens awareness, design, and speed. We’ve learned to move faster, to listen better, to build differently.
The sea keeps changing — and it won’t wait.
Neither will the markets.
Shipyards waiting for perfect, low-cost software will find themselves sailing in someone else’s wake.
Those who integrate with technology partners and set the standards of adoption, lead.