Thank you for joining us today for a fireside chat with John Gibson, the Chief Executive Officer of Nauticus Robotics, Nasdaq ticker KITT. I'm Peter Gastreich, energy transition and sustainable investing analyst here at Water Tower Research. Nauticus develops autonomous underwater drone or AUD robots and software that service ocean industries like offshore oil and gas, wind power, defense, and deep sea mineral exploration. Its electric-powered robots enhance safety, efficiency, and precision, cutting costs with the added benefit of cutting carbon emissions for its customers. Now, just to give viewers today a hint as to what's ahead, I'll be asking John about KITT's recently announced big strategic investment with UAE-based Master Investment Group. What's coming out of the Stuart, Florida, testing facility, progress on Forum Energy Technologies' collaboration on manipulators, the key milestones for investors, and much more. Before we begin, I want to remind listeners that the company's safe harbor statements can be found under the Investor Relations tab on the company's corporate homepage. Also note this fireside chat may not be reproduced or a written transcript distributed without the express written consent of Water Tower Research. Our discussion could include forward-looking statements as of today, March 23rd, 2026. This fireside chat is an open access forum for investors, analysts, and stakeholders. It is being recorded and can be accessed later via Water Tower Research's website. With that, let's turn to Mr. Gibson. John, good afternoon, and thank you for joining us today. Pleasure to be here, Peter. Okay, well, let's get started here. You know, John, for our listeners who may be new to the Nauticus story, could you give us a quick overview of the company and if you will, just a bit of background on yourself and what drew you to KITT? Well, I guess I'll start with me. I am a serial CEO, Peter, and so I've had a wonderful career, mostly in technology. I began my career at Chevron, managed subsurface research for Chevron. Left to go run a software company in Austin called Zycor. It was part of Landmark Graphics. We grew Landmark Graphics, and it was one of the largest software sales at the time. We sold to Halliburton. I stayed on at Halliburton, ended up CEO of Halliburton Energy Services. I ran Halliburton, the company you know today globally, for a number of years. Left there to go and run a tech company in the geophysical space that had a market cap of about $40 million. We sold that company about four and a half years later. It sold for just under $1 billion. I ran an environmental service company in Canada that we grew from $2 billion to about $6 billion a year in revenue over a 4-year period and came back to be a banker, but I was a terrible banker. It was not much into deal flow, which is sort of the banking industry today. I enjoyed giving advice. I went back to being a CEO again. I ran a chemical company that had a lot of difficulties. We worked out of the difficulties there and in almost the exact same condition that Nauticus was in when I took over as CEO here. We managed to get a company that had $40 million in revenue a year. We secured a $2.2 billion contract to deliver services to one of the stimulation companies. It took our revenue in a single year from $40 million to over $250 million a year and just transformed that company. Their share price at the time I joined was below $1, not unlike Nauticus today. Today, I think you'd see that stock trading at about $17 a share as a result of what we did there. Pretty exciting. Joined Flowtech on the board and then became CEO when we ran into some difficulties and have been reshaping and reconditioning the company to get that same growth and profile that I've accomplished in the past. I think it's the perfect technology base to create a great company. I'm excited to be here and to work on the company. The company itself, why is it so exciting? Well, you can be certain that the ocean is becoming a great part of the understanding of the global economy, and we're at the heart of where the ocean technology is going. Our product lines include Aquanaut, which is really an underwater drone. If you think of a lot of what's been used in the past, it's been vehicles that they have long range, but they have no ability for you to interact with them on their missions. They simply go in straight lines or patterns and don't have the ability to stop and hover to orbit objects and to identify them. Think of this more as an airborne drone that works underwater. We can stop, we can orbit around an object and get three-dimensional images. We can interact with that object. The Aquanaut gives you basically an autonomous, no tether whatsoever, underwater vehicle that operates down to 3,000 m or is certified to that depth. We've only been to 2,500 so far. We'll go deeper when people pay to go deeper, but 3,000 really is the engineering cutoff on this generation of Aquanaut. We can build them to go to 5,000 m and deeper if the ocean minerals market really emerges in the way that people hope. We have that vehicle, and that is our platform. Without that platform, we couldn't really be leaders in autonomy, which is the operating system that takes the vehicle down and lets it operate without human controls. Everything about collision avoidance, about orbiting, about gathering of data, all of that's done autonomously. We simply program in, much like a hiker, if you own a Garmin and you decide to go take a hike, you put in waypoints as to where you wanna go along that hike and the monuments that you want to look at and what you want to do while you're in each one of the stops. We do the same thing with the Aquanaut. We program in the waypoints. We give it a hike. We put it in the water. It goes from waypoint to waypoint, identifies the monument that we want it to observe. It moves around that monument, gathers the information. We gather information along the way between the waypoints and we are able to send some of that data up through a really high compression back to the surface via ACOMMS so that we can guarantee that it's performing the mission that we gave it. It completes that mission and returns to the surface, and we download terabytes of data that have been collected by the sensors on the bottom. Six of the sensors give us the ability to do navigation, perception. Sixteen of them are mission dependent. You tell us what you wanna know about the subsea, the infrastructure, and we configure those particular sensors, whether it's metallic objects or pipelines, linear objects. If we're doing leak detection, we have the ability to look for leaks. We can actually determine the composition of leaks. We're working on including sensors that allow us to do that without having to take physical samples. It's really that. That's the platform. ToolKITT, it's platform agnostic. We can run it on any subsurface platform. We've done it on Comanche, which is an ROV platform from Forum Energy Technologies, FET, that we're doing manipulators with as well. Our very first example of that improved productivity of that ROV in terms of transit times by almost 30%. It gives opportunities for ROV operators to do more with less equipment, less capital outlay, and we're excited about that. We currently are using it on our ROVs, and it's really giving us advantages in competing in that marketplace for ROV work with current ROVs, sort of giving them the ability to do that navigation, the waypoint component, not necessarily interacting. The operator can still do that, but we take away the navigation part and so it's a critical element. The manipulators are also in our wheelhouse. We licensed one generation of our manipulators to FET. Why? We're not a great manufacturing company, and so we look for partnerships to do manufacturing, and FET looked like an excellent opportunity. They have a great track record for manufacturing, including ROVs, and they give, you know, us the market to deploy those in. They already have an install base of ROVs that we can build and deliver those new generation electric manipulators, replacing the old hydraulics so that you can reduce the environmental impact of leaking hydraulic fluids. Very exciting to work with them. We get a license fee back for the manipulator, but we also provide the perception software for the manipulator itself. Imagine that you have an arm that can interact with the environment around it without an operator as well. If you want to pick up something, recover something, perhaps it would be a black box after an airplane accident in the ocean, and you wanted to recover that. We could train the vehicle to go and look for that black box and recover it, which would be a very mission-specific type of activity, which you'd put the sensors on there for that specific purpose. We have the ROVs themselves, which we're using for typical ROV work in the ocean to include placement of ocean bottom nodes, as well as inspection of pipelines and risers and mooring lights. We're learning from them how to train the Aquanaut. Today, we really are taking our technology from having a technology, you know, a subsurface, you know, underwater drone, and saying, "What missions should we teach that vehicle to do?" We're now well beyond developing technology. Now we're into mission design and really training this vehicle to do, you know, different orbits to identify certain objects and interact with those objects. We're well beyond tech now. We're into mission training for a vehicle. Finally, we do some consulting work. We've got quite a lot of opportunity of late coming in from the defense sector asking us if we're able to do certain missions. We're pursuing some consulting contracts around the mission opportunities in the defense sector. That's basically all that we do here, and it's not really much. It's an underwater vehicle, an operating system for autonomy in the ocean, manipulators and the defense contracting as well as the ROV business where we're learning how ROVs operate so that we can disintermediate the ROV industry with a new generation of subsurface vehicles. Okay, great. Thanks, John. That's a great introduction. In a moment we're gonna get back to. Sorry, can you hear me okay? Yeah. Okay. Sorry. Yeah, in just a moment here, we'll, you know, move into your strategy and some of your developments with the UAE and so forth. First I just wanna address, you've been busy with some team building, you know, this year. Just wanna you know, talk a little bit about that. You've had a, you know, flurry of high-profile and, you know, skilled leadership moves recently. What can you tell us about the new hire and the transitions, and what signals should investors take from the timing and profile of these moves and how will it map to KITT's revenue? Well, our most recent hire is Dr. Easton, KJ joined us, background at Google doing robotics, as well as doing some defense software applications. Our ToolKITT product is just awesome. We're in that transition of taking it from serviceware to commercial software. We needed someone who had done that. The great part is that we interviewed several people that are incredibly good at commercializing software platforms and wanted them to take a look and give us an honest assessment of where were we, how long would it take, what would we have to invest, how do you make that happen, because we have a fantastic product, but it needs to be commercialized and completed. KJ came in, did quite a lot of diligence on us in looking at our product, looking at our capabilities, looking how it compared to things that she had done at Google and Maxar, and was able to give us a really clear understanding of what needs to be done and how quickly it could be done and what investment would need to be made. The great part of it is when you have tremendous talent like KJ, who I look forward to having her on one of these Fireside Chats, and they understand where it is and see the advantages and they've been in this field, in autonomy, and they believe that you're close, that it needs a few things that are critical but are, we'll say straightforward. There's nothing about this that requires a breakthrough. We just are now polishing the product for commercial release as opposed to trying to create a product. She came in specifically to do that. I'm excited to have her here. She can come on one day and explain to you exactly the components that are needed. A big piece of it is robustness certification, testing and the automation of that, but she is implementing that as we speak. We look forward to seeing the first, I'll say, major release. We're able to deploy it on other vehicles now, and we do it with consulting and assistance with them, and that's going well. What we wanna do is have people be able to unload it, put it on their vehicles and operate it themselves with a minimum amount of training. That's where we can really sorta open a toll booth and just take money as we go through, as opposed to having to support it after we've released it. We're very close to being in that position. The- Okay. That's great. Yeah. Sorry, yeah, we'd love to have her at some point for a Fireside Chat. Yeah, just let us know on that. Absolutely. She would be awesome. It's a real talent. What's exciting is when you get great people to join, it tells you about where the technology is. I mean, it's not just people that wanna be, it's people that have done things and they know what it takes to do it, and they can come in and give you an honest assessment and say, "You know, I can name that tune in three notes." Right. This is the person you want. It's one that can name this tune in the fewest number of notes. KJ gave us great confidence she knew what to do, how to do it, and how quickly she could get it done. Okay, that's great. You've been pursuing a capital light licensing model and late last year you announced the Forum Energy Technologies collaboration for electric manipulators. You mentioned it earlier. How has that been progressing, and what has this taught you about scaling through collaboration? Well, it's the first time for us to do this, and we've got a great partner in FET. I'd say the biggest challenges for us have been getting all of the documentation, you know, all of the files, all the engineering drawings, et cetera, just transferred over to them and walking everybody through it. We're still in that stage of getting everything transferred for the manufacturer. You know, FET, a fantastic partner and are working very closely with us and we are getting through that initial stage of getting everybody on the same page as to what we think needs to be approved, what they think is necessary for their vehicles and the enhancements. I think it's progressing extremely well. We look forward to seeing their first commercial release, but hard to talk about that when I'm dependent on FET. I'm looking forward to listening to them on a Fireside Chat, talking about when that first one will come out. Our license revenue from that will be outstanding because the capital light's a great term. We really didn't have the ability to scale to be a manufacturer and finding a partner for that and getting them out there is really important. That gives us an opportunity to deploy the software component, which we're commercializing with KJ, to those arms, and it opens up that market for us, and we've retained that ability to put the perception on the arm. There'll be a license fee for each arm above the license of the arm that is available to the company as a revenue stream, and that's a very high margin business for us, where you're looking at software margins and it can be a strong contributor to our growth and the company as we go forward. You demonstrated a toolkit on a legacy Comanche ROV last year with 30%-40% efficiency gains. You have Kjerstin Easton now leading software, and you have thousands of tethered ROVs in the global installed base. How does the retrofit opportunity size up versus the Aquanaut business, and what's the rollout timeline there? Well, you know, less revenue, more earnings is how software works. What is interesting about it, we have a customer now, hopefully I can talk about later, but they have a fleet of multiple vendor ROVs, right? So they've bought different ROVs. Imagine you've got, say, 25 or 30 ROVs, and you've got 5 of each variety, and y ou have to train ROV operators in each one of those platforms. The fungibility of those operators is reduced. You can't just have everybody work on everything. You have to have a different set of operators for each different set of equipment because the operating systems of the vehicles are significantly different. We can bring to them the ability to make all the vehicles function with the same operating system. Just having the same operating system on every vehicle is advantageous to ROV companies that are using multiple platforms. Okay, first, tremendous savings on training and requirement safety, et cetera, offshore. The other one, though, is this, the software because of the autonomy, and this has really augmented humans in some ways. The operator is still sitting there, but they're not driving the vehicle. When they drive the vehicle, the ROV, and they're operating it, they are actually overcoming current, they're overcoming dragging the tether through the water as well as the umbilical. It is difficult for them to really maintain a course because they are having to operate each of the thrusters and drive it like you drive a car. Okay. In our case, the vehicle people have asked me this, you know, "How does it estimate the current? How are you doing all these corrections?" I go, "Well, it's interesting. It's not doing that at all." It's that hiking algorithm that we were talking about earlier where you're going from waypoint to waypoint. It's adjusting all of the thrusters in real time in order to maintain a straight line. Okay. As a consequence, it's not having to correct as a result of being off course and steering back onto the line or steering up or down. It gets a bottom lock, and from our sensors, and it knows exactly how far to stay from the bottom, and it operates all those thrusters to maintain that 18 inches or 24 inches from the bottom. No operator required. It's optimizing a straight line as you're doing the traverse. No operator requirement, and it actually optimizes that straight line. That's where we're seeing that 30% improvement is just the navigation alone as they have a difficult time maintaining the altitude perfectly and maintaining the course. If you think about it as a data processor, that you're getting much better data when you're not having overlapping data and gaps in the data as a result of the wandering of the vehicle. You're not having to bend the data and reprocess it. We're giving you a very usable form of data that's much higher quality because there's no variation in the altitude of the vehicle, nor are you missing gaps as a result of moving back and forth. We think the data quality is going to be exceptionally higher. That's the real value. But in terms of cost for operators, reducing your traverse times by 30%, it means reduced boat time. Boat time's $100,000 a day. That's a $30,000 a day savings to operators if they can take 30% of their navigation time out. The operators love it, which is even better. The ROV operator goes, "This is the exhausting part of doing the work. What we really want to focus on is our observations, ensuring we're gathering the right data, we're on the right infrastructure. You're sort of elevating them to adding more value through their experience and less time just basically steering the vehicle. You're, you know, your competitors are sitting within, you know, quite large companies like Oceaneering, Saab and Saipem. You've mentioned in the past that, you know, you're all sort of, you know, rooting for each other within this industry. Is that you still view it that way and how do you differentiate yourselves or KITT as a small pure play against these larger, you know, companies? Well, it's when you're public and you're small, everything you do can be scrutinized, and we've got a lot of attention on us. If you're part of a large company, these are all venture capital efforts inside of our competitors too, right? They're very small divisions in a company fighting for scarce resources, and they're trying to get funding as well. They're just doing the funding internally as opposed to us doing it through the market. I think they're just as challenged to get all the money they need to create a new product line that in many ways has the innovator's dilemma problem. They really are focused on their install bases. They're looking at cannibalizing your install base with the new generation of technology. I've been there and done that. That's really difficult, right? You have to fight for funding when you're running those divisions in those companies. At the same time, they're tremendous names, and you know you're in the right space when your largest competitors are doing something that's similar to what you do. If they're having to invest in this, then you know that our investment is prudent because they know this is the future. All we have to do is just stay ahead of them. It's such a small market and emerging that we probably have less today than 0.5% of the underwater drones that are needed to really make this energy industry more efficient. We've got a large market share in that 0.5%, but there are hundreds of vehicles to be built over the next decade, thousands to replace how we do ROVs today. We need more data and more observation, not less. The sensorification of the ocean is underway, gathering the data from the sensors, gathering more information about the health of coral reefs, leak detection. These are things where we've done okay, but I think we're gonna continue to get better and better so that we know the impact on the oceans of our activities. I think this is the perfect place for autonomy and untethered vehicles to add to the marketplace as well as defense. Well, last fall, you moved Aquanaut to the AOS Lake Facility in Stuart, Florida. I recall you called it a game changer for testing and also for customer access. Now that you've had several months there, what's come out of that program? Are there any, you know, upcoming milestones or customer events at that facility that you'd like to share with the investors? You know, it's interesting. A lot of customers that are coming, and potential customers. Particularly, we're entertaining a number of the defense contractors have made the journey down to Florida to see the vehicle work and see it in action and to actually drive it. That's something that we haven't done in the last two years that I've been here. We've sort of focused entirely on commercial work and making the vehicle and software robust. Now we're getting a lot of interest out of the defense sector and seeing what it does, how it does it. They are extrapolating from what we're doing in the oil and gas industry to what's possible in defense. Where are we? Well, when you go to see it, a lot of people are just showing you a vehicle and that it works, okay? That's what we would've been doing last year. Now you can go and see a vehicle that we're training to do specific inspections and work that the vehicle literally knows what actions to take when it arrives at the location on the bottom. Does it orbit around a pipe all the way to the surface? How do you find the anchor position on the bottom? How do you orbit that riser all the way to the surface? How does it know what the offset distance is that gives you the best data for imaging a mooring line or a riser? You train the vehicle to do that. Then after that, it does it on its own. You don't have a tether that goes around and around, so you're having to orbit halfway around and halfway back or have two vehicles to get the full coverage of the or move the boat. In this case, you're saving tremendous amounts of time in terms of both boat and ROV activity if you're able to just orbit with an untethered autonomous vehicle. Now we're training missions, and so we're taking it from being a tech to having workflows that are built into the vehicle that we can just click on it and it'll perform that workflow. This is a huge game changer in terms of our company and how work is done. It's not just a camera on a stick at the bottom of the ocean. It literally is a fully autonomous robot that is serving a purpose and we know the exact value of what is being gathered. Okay. I'd love to see one of those tests someday, or I'm sure investors would like to see that as well. Well, we are working hard on an investor day. It's interesting. We have plans to do one here pretty quick. Sort of rethinking that only because it's. Hopefully we'll get to it in a minute. You know, I'd love to have our new investment group MIG join us there, and it's a little difficult getting in and out of the UAE at the moment. We also think that some of the work that's going on, we can highlight better as we complete it, and we wanna be able to share some of the activities that are going on. We may slip it a little bit as we begin to plan this investor day, but we think so much good is going on, we wanna have an opportunity to bring that forward and show it to the investment group. It's exciting times here. Okay, that's great. Well, let's move on to, you know, the big news in the UAE. You know, KITT, just for our listeners, I think everyone's aware of this, t hey announced an up to $50 million strategic investment with UAE-based Master Investment Group. John, you know, this included a commitment to help secure initial Aquanaut deployment contract, right? You know, how did this relationship come together? Why the UAE, and where do things stand with the approvals and the definitive agreements? With UAE, I mean, you know, another one of our lenders introduced us and we followed up there. They've had an interest in Nauticus for many years out of MIG. They've been following the company, and I got an opportunity to sit down with them there in Ras Al Khaimah. We discussed what their view is of Ras Al Khaimah and where what the future is for Ras Al Khaimah. They have about 1,500 companies operating there now in the free trade zone, and they're focused on manufacturing, and so they do quite a lot of advanced manufacturing there in Ras Al Khaimah. We're very serious about what's our business plan and how do we need to pursue that. What they felt they could bring was a manufacturing facility and capabilities and access to engineering and equipment there that would allow us to manufacture additional Aquanauts with the goal of manufacturing 10 was our first objective, client 10. In discussing with them, doing one at a time is quite expensive. You need some scale and scope on the ordering of motors and priority with vendors on the components that we use, whether it be the foam, the motors for the vehicle, the sensors. We wanted to have enough orders that we got pricing associated with volume as opposed to one at a time. We also wanted to get a priority with those vendors as well, including battery vendors. All of these things are in short supply, and so you wanna move up in the queue, and 10 puts you really far up in the queue when you start looking at ordering the components for 10. Hence the reason for $50 million. We were looking at the price of that we thought we could manufacture vehicles and setting up the facility and the cost of establishing it there. Their promise to us was that we would work towards a joint effort that had us with the manufacturing facility set up, staffed, ready to go, that could produce 10 Aquanauts. After that, we'd hope to be able to produce that many or more a year. This UAE model, where regional partner funds the facility and manufacturing while KITT supplies the technology, this looks like a great model for scaling. With that intention, could you see this structure working in other markets overseas? You know, I like doing things one at a time, Peter. Just like, let me make this one successful, and I do think we can scale it. I think they're a great partner in that they not only are gonna help us with manufacturing, but they're making introductions for us to people in the region. They have a tremendous amount of subsea infrastructure there and a lot of boat traffic, believe it or not. When you've got as many boats as they do on the surface that are moving about, USVs as well as manned boats, putting the Aquanaut in the water, particularly without any kind of boat presence, so, you know, we're doing a launch from shore effort in Florida where we won't need a boat on the surface at all. Most of their infrastructure is within the range of what an Aquanaut can do without requiring a surface vessel. We can send it out, do the mission, have it come back to the shore. There's just a phenomenal market for an Aquanaut in the Middle East that works without requiring a vessel. The water depths there are extremely favorable to us. The deepest water that you'd encounter in the Gulf there is gonna be about 300 m. That's a depth where we can operate with really high reliability on the ACOMMS. It's much simpler than going to 3,000 m. It's something that we can do, you know, 240 km of traverse a day. We go back to that hike again. We can take a 240 km hike there, and no trouble at all. It's that gives us the ability to survey a lot of the subsea infrastructure off the shore, the coast of Dubai, Doha, you know, in Oman. All of that is doable from our facility that we'll be operating out of in the UAE. Okay. Great. I'd like to turn to your financing and capital strategy here. You know, KITT has been funding operations through a combination of equity raises, debt conversions, and the $250 million equity line of credit. With Master Investment Group backing Aquanaut manufacturing expansion in the UAE and the Forum Energy collaboration offloading manipulator CapEx, how are you thinking about KITT's path to cash flow neutrality and how would you characterize the cash burn trajectory through 2026? It's giving us, particularly in the UAE, the ability to expand without increasing our cost, as they're basically underwriting the expansion in the UAE and funding. We also, you know, they're gonna assist with marketing as well. I think that's gonna be a big component of what we're doing. You'll see new web pages. You'll see more social media. I mean, we're working hard towards also promoting them. This is a mutually beneficial activity. They're excited about being at the front end of a new technology and having it manufactured there in the UAE, and we're excited about being there. To do that, we need to do a lot more marketing effort for both of us, where people can see the advantages and the excitement and the progress we're making. We're gonna need to revamp everything that we do. Our webpage needs a facelift, and so we'll do that in the spirit of bringing forward the FET work, also bringing forward the MIG work in the UAE and the capabilities and missions of the vehicle. So much has changed that we need to just update all of that material. Being capital light like we are, we've invested everything in technology and nothing in marketing. We're probably the best-kept secret in the maritime space at the moment. We don't really have that high a profile. I think you'll see us attending ADIPEC and other of the marketing opportunities in the UAE. We'll have presence there as we begin to roll this out. We're moving into a sales and marketing phase in the company, and UAE is underwriting a lot of that, Peter. I think it's gonna bring us some recognition that we haven't had over the last couple of years. Well, the last time that we I think it was a couple of months ago, the last time we hosted you for a podcast, you said that you know 2026 would be the year that KITT shifts from you know survive to thrive. You now have two commercial Aquanauts, new go-to-market leadership in place, Silicon Valley software talent, and a major UAE manufacturing partner. Now with the investor perspective in mind, what are two or three milestones that investors should kind of watch out for or look out for for the remainder of this year? Alternatively, what keeps you up at night? Well, that's what keeps me up at night, we probably can't talk about on a fireside chat. That's an excellent question. The things that I'm following really closely are we've got some really large opportunities with the ROVs using ToolKITT. That is dual purpose. One is it's significant revenue for our ROVs. It's also a proof of concept on using this, and we're being hired in large part because of our efficiency with the ROVs over the competitive bidders. At a price that is not dissimilar to what the competitor would bid, we should be able to finish in 30% of the time. That's where a turnkey-type bid, you can make quite a lot of money. If you've got the same price and 30% less vessel days, all of that turns into margin for you on that bid. We've got a couple of bids out that are game changers for us, and we're looking forward to that. Both of the bids that are exciting are international bids. You're seeing international opportunities expand for us, both for the ROVs and the Aquanaut. A very exciting software. KJ being here, we've been in negotiations for months on and these are transformational for companies, right? This is not a sale where you just go out and they buy something small. You're saying, "Let's transform the way you do business." I think we've got a couple of contracts associated with software sales that are exciting and in the pipeline. It's software sales I would look closely at. The Aquanaut is exciting as to how it changes the industry, and I think it's going to, as we begin to show the manufacturing capability and greater numbers of them, that we'll be able to take on more work that is value creating for customers where they want to disintermediate the way they do work today. You know, you're still looking at a longer timeframe for the Aquanauts to really ramp up and make a significant difference because we need more of them. The manipulators, we've got a new manipulator coming out that's greatly simplified, that you should see a prototype of in the next two months that will be built and operational, that is transformational for us because we have simplified it to use on underwater drones as opposed to what you'd use on an ROV. Something that can be really useful and create additional value but not have complexity to it. You want something that's robust, easy to operate, doesn't drain the battery. We've got to design this specific for drones that we think's going to be coveted by everybody that owns one. I hope I'm selling it to all of the big competitors I have today. Again, this is a let's work together to see if we can't change this industry. I'm excited about showing them the new generation of manipulator that we have. Much simpler, much cleaner, much easier to repair on deck. Everything is. You have to think about the fact that where you're trying to make upgrades and modifications, it's moving, right? It moves up and down, back and forth, and they need to replace parts and, you know, install, de-install. It's pretty exciting. You also have to think about the fact that the manipulator itself creates design issues for a drone. It's the reason I think we're advanced over any of our competitors in this space. Our vehicle is designed for manipulators, and when you extend manipulators, you change the center of mass of the vehicle. Everything has to be operational so that you can manage how much thrust is required to balance the vehicle. If you put them out there and you don't have the ability to trim the vehicle, you have to use the thrusters to hold the front up and as you change the weight position. I think we're by far and away the leader in the autonomous underwater vehicle space using manipulators and understanding the design and the deployment. Look for this new manipulator and having it deployed on Aquanauts here in 2026, latter part of the year. Okay, great. Yeah, lots to look forward to there. We've really covered quite a bit today, John. It's been very comprehensive. Is there anything you can think of that we might have missed or any concluding remarks you'd like to provide? No, I mean, having been in the oil and gas industry, it's interesting to see what's happening with oil prices at the moment. I do hope that this is just a spike in the price and that they do come down. We find that price spikes actually slow down the overall economy, and it's good for oil and gas, bad for the general economy. On the oil and gas side, I think, there's a lot that is happening. Usually, when you have this, it causes the next year to be great as opposed to the year that you're in. There, the cash that they generate off these spikes is what they invest in the year ahead. Look for 2027 to be an exciting year in oil and gas as they go back and invest the money they're making now in the infrastructure next year to meet the rise in demand. I think this really lays the road for a great 2027 for offshore oil and gas work, and we'll see you know how that comes about. The defense sector you know it's. I'm not a defense contractor, even though I'm more than happy to support them. You hate seeing a world in which this becomes critical. I think it creates a lot of opportunity for us in the near term, and it's highlighting and exactly the technology needs that are offshore to work in this new world. Just as you've seen the airborne drones become the choice for offensive applications in defense, you can see a world where underwater drones are gonna do the same thing, Peter. I think you're gonna see tremendous advances from all countries and the use of underwater drones for defense operations. You need, you know, both offensive and defensive capabilities there. I think you're gonna see a lot of activity in that space as well. I think, you know, we're well positioned to help in those areas. What we wanna do is be a technology leader. It doesn't really matter what market. I'm great with the fiber market and doing work on telecoms. I mean, I think that's tremendous. Our ROVs have quite a lot of opportunity doing wind work. In the coming months, this year we'll be doing a lot of support for the wind infrastructure, which gives us a great opportunity in the European markets as well, and we're just now understanding how to work in the international markets. I think watch and see how we do as we talk about some international work and opportunities coming forward this year as well. What keeps me awake is working outside of the U.S. You know, there's a lot to it other than just going international. You have to understand all the requirements, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and export controls and ensuring that you're blocking and tackling so that you can do it well without penalty. We're having to invest in ensuring the company is prepared to be international, and not just rushing into the international markets. I'm concerned about our international growth opportunities in doing that well, and to include UAE. We're doing a lot of work there to make sure that we are ready to be international, not just going international. Okay. Thanks, John. It's always a pleasure to have you in for our Fireside Chats and podcasts. I feel like you've generated quite a few good ideas for our future content for our podcast and Fireside Chat, so look forward to having you back, as well as with, you know, whoever you wanna invite in to join you. Well, I hope I've got a lot more Fireside Chats left in me, Peter. You know? I see me here on the screen here, and I go, "Well, you know, we need a young guy doing this." We're gonna have to bring in some of my team to do the future ones. Okay. Well, sounds good. We'll certainly be following the developments at KITT very closely and look forward to future conversations with you and, of course, with your team. Also to the investors who are tuning in, we thank you as well for joining us today for this Fireside Chat with John Gibson, CEO of Nauticus Robotics, Nasdaq ticker KITT. For investors who would like to follow research on energy transition and sustainable investing and other sectors that we cover at Water Tower, please access our website, www.watertowerresearch.com. Of course, keep an eye out for a forthcoming management series writeup of today's Fireside Chat with Nauticus Robotics. 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