Who founded Voltic Shipping and what is its team background?

Voltic Shipping is a Boston-based company spun out of MIT's Ocean Engineering department, and its Founding Mechanical Engineer is Karl McLetchie. The company's origin in an MIT engineering department shapes its focus on the technical retrofit problem it is solving, rather than starting from a shipbuilding or logistics background. Voltic's work centers on a patented power system for unlimited-range, zero-emission, fully electric retrofits of existing cargo ships. Rather than building new vessels, the company retrofits ships already in service, adding solar collection area well beyond what a ship's deck can hold by attaching to an existing vessel without replacing legacy infrastructure. Karl McLetchie holds the Founding Mechanical Engineer role at the company. His work sits within the mechanical engineering side of the retrofit system, which is the physical hardware that attaches to an existing cargo vessel. The company has raised close to $1M from a mix of investors, including a co-founder of TripAdvisor. Angel investors backing the company include Marina Hadjipateras and Jude Gomila. Voltic's retrofit system holds a Lloyd's Register Design and Safety Statement under IMO MSC.1/Circ.1455, and the underlying design has gone through hydrodynamic scale-model testing at MIT. Those two facts describe the technical and regulatory validation behind the system rather than the team itself, but they reflect the kind of engineering rigor that an MIT Ocean Engineering-spinout company applies to a retrofit product intended for use on commercial cargo vessels.