Paka is a fleet of solar-powered, self-driving vessels that will find floating plastic and lift it out of the water before it sinks, spreads, or gets swallowed — no fuel, no crew, no rest.
Rivers and storm drains carry debris toward the sea — but not directly. It pools in harbours, estuaries, and river mouths along the way, still floating and still reachable. Paka works that bottleneck.
A piece of plastic spends weeks in coastal water before currents carry it out. That's the window Paka was designed to work in.
Paka is a solar-powered, self-driving catamaran designed to patrol the coastline in shifts — scanning the water ahead, lifting confirmed plastic into a sealed hold, and returning to dock when it's full.
Cameras classify everything ahead in real time. Anything alive gets a wide berth.
The conveyor lifts confirmed plastic into the hold while the vessel holds a steady, low-wake speed.
When the hold is full or the sun sets, Paka plots the shortest course home — or hands its lane to the next vessel on shift.
The hull is a catamaran — twin floats that stay stable in chop without tipping, leaving an open channel down the middle for collecting debris.
A slow-moving belt at the bow lifts floating debris out of the water and drops it into the hold — no propellers near the surface.
A sealed, watertight container amidships holds collected waste until the vessel returns to shore or meets a collection boat.
Panels across the rear deck charge the onboard battery in daylight and keep the vessel running after dark.
Electric motors between the hulls move the vessel quietly, at a speed slow enough for the cameras to check every wave before the belt reaches it.
A camera sits at the bow of each hull, scanning the surface ahead and telling plastic apart from driftwood, foam, and anything alive.
Sonar along the waterline tracks depth and current, so the vessel can hold position in tricky water without drifting off course.
Click on a boat or the dock for more info ^_^
Every Paka fleet ships with a live operations dashboard — position, battery, hold capacity, water-quality readings, and every piece of plastic collected, timestamped and exportable.
We're building in the open. Here's the plan from the first prototype to a fleet you can actually see on your coastline.
The vessel is fully designed, and we're raising the funding to build the first working prototype.
A single-hull working prototype tested in a marina — proving the conveyor intake and the vision system on real, floating debris.
Multiple vessels in open coastal water, refining hull stability, detection accuracy, and battery life across real conditions.
A small fleet deployed with a coastal partner, running daily routes and publishing open data on everything collected.
If yours isn't here, ask us directly — hello@paka.ocean.
The design uses a vision system to detect living things ahead of the intake and pause the conveyor for them. The vessel is capped at a speed slow enough to react in time. Nothing like this has been built yet, but the plan is for Paka to be a passive collector — not a net.
Paka isn't meant to be a recycling plant. Collected debris will come back to shore, where it will be sorted by material and handed to recycling and waste-processing partners. Every piece will be logged in the open dataset by material type before it leaves the vessel.
The design has each vessel navigating with GPS, sonar depth sensing, and a satellite link back to shore, and staying inside a defined operating lane. If it drifts outside that lane, loses power, or loses connection, it stops in place and signals for retrieval instead of continuing on its own.
We're raising the funding to build our first prototype now. Waitlist members hear first when we have sea trials and pilot locations to share, and cities, harbors, and conservation groups can reach out directly to talk about hosting an early pilot.
We're an early-stage project, currently raising our first round to fund the prototype. The waitlist and pilot conversations are how commercial partnerships will start.
We're raising the funding to build our first prototype. Join the waitlist for early access, build updates, and a first look when we launch near you.