DeepMelon Technologies — We build technologies that unlock interspecies friendship and redefine human potential

STATUS: BOOTSTRAPPING · HIRING CTO

We build technologies that unlock
interspecies friendship
and redefine human potential.

A deep tech venture · Gdańsk · 2026

→ CTO_position.open() cat ./manifest.md
// TELEMETRY
TRL
2
concept_formulated
FOUNDED
2026
Gdańsk, Pomerania
DIVE_HOURS
450+
founder ground truth
TARGET
EIC 2027
Horizon Pathfinder
// THE_STACK

What we’re mapping.

We’re at TRL 2. Concept formulated, technological path still to be drawn. These are the open questions we’re sitting with — the territory a founding CTO will help chart. Some of them are research-frontier hard. We know.

QUESTION_01 / hardware
Is there a path forward from where the research stands today?
Underwater acoustic sensing research is real and active — hydrophone design, signal conditioning, calibration drift, biofouling resistance. The frontier is partially mapped. The question isn’t whether the science exists. The question is what it would take to extend it from research instrument to deployable system that survives months in the field without service. The remaining stretches need a hardware engineer who can read a paper, see the next experiment, and choose whether to run it themselves or partner with a lab that already can.
QUESTION_02 / physics
How do you measure something the ocean is actively trying to hide from you, across the full cetacean vocalization spectrum?
Saltwater attenuation. Thermoclines bending sound paths. Ambient noise floors that vary by twenty decibels between morning and afternoon. Frequency-dependent absorption that makes long-range detection of high-frequency clicks fundamentally bounded by water chemistry, not engineering. The physical constraints aren’t bugs we can engineer around — they’re the boundary conditions inside which we design. What can be measured cleanly, at what range, across the 0.2 to 150 kHz cetacean range — that’s the real first-principles question.
QUESTION_03 / interspecies
Is real-time two-way communication a stretch? Yes. So what.
Bidirectional acoustic communication with cetaceans would require us to solve problems that span signal processing, animal cognition, comparative linguistics, and ethical experimental design. The AI side has new public resources — Google DeepMind’s DolphinGemma, the CETI project’s foundation models, and the broader cetacean bioacoustics research ecosystem. None of these solve the engineering problem of running inference on power-constrained hardware in a sub-sea environment with no cloud dependency. We’d need to build an entire industrial capability around it. That’s exactly the point. If it were one step away, someone would already be there.
QUESTION_04 / black swan
What ends this project before it gets to do its work?
Maybe the hardware never reaches the reliability needed for the deployment scenarios we have in mind. Maybe the data scarcity is structural — cetacean linguistic ground truth is genuinely sparse, and no AI model can manufacture insight from absence. Maybe what cetaceans are doing acoustically is fundamentally not what we think, and the interpretive frame needs to shift. We don’t know what we don’t know. Founders of an ambitious venture owe themselves and their team an honest reckoning with what could fail — not as a hedge against doing the work, but as a parameter of the work itself. We treat the question as a continuous one.
QUESTION_05 / hardware that exists
What’s the first physical thing we ship?
All of the above is theoretical until something exists. A first device. Maybe a wrist-worn unit on a dive-computer form factor. Maybe a buoy-mounted edge computer running inference on-site. Maybe a diver-deployable acoustic logger small enough to be carried, rugged enough to be forgotten on the seabed. The specific form factor is still to be decided — and that’s exactly the conversation we’re looking forward to having with the right CTO. But there will be a first object. Something to hold, calibrate, deploy, recover, learn from, and iterate. The science only matters when it gets embodied.
// THE_TEAM

Who's building this.

PK
Paulina Kamińska
founder & president

Financial and strategic architect — builds the inner and outer structures that let people run and grow the business.

Chartered Professional Accountant from Toronto, Canada. Fifteen-plus years across private equity, M&A, institutional funders, complex cross-border transactions, and the operating finance work that makes scale possible. Part of a sale to a publicly traded company. Has run finance for organisations 10× DeepMelon’s current scale.

Sets up the institutional plumbing serious deep tech requires: corporate structure, capital strategy, grant compliance, IP architecture, investor and stakeholder relations. The kind of foundation a founding CTO can trust and stop thinking about.

A deep thinker who loves hard problems. The kind of person who reads the regulation, asks why it exists, and figures out how to build something better inside or around it.

Also: 450+ dives across the Pacific, Atlantic, Indian Ocean, Mediterranean, Red Sea, and the Great Lakes. The technology gets field-tested by someone who has lived underwater.

OPEN
[ your name here ]
CTO — currently descending

We’re looking for a founding CTO ready to venture into the unknown — to follow untraveled paths with an innovative spirit, hard science, and the determination to make it work in the actual ocean.

Depth in one of: ML and signal processing (acoustic preferred), embedded systems and edge deployment, or marine environmental sensor systems. You’ll co-define the technical strategy, own product architecture end-to-end, and build the team.

Pomerania-based or willing to relocate. Equity participation. Mission alignment matters more than résumé.

deepmelon@pm.me  // we read every message

// MISSION

Why this is worth our time.

// MISSION
We believe communication is universal.
We want to prove it by talking to dolphins.
Our values — parameters to explore the uncharted waters.
01Friendship
02Science & inquiry
03Principle of uncertainty
04Adventure
05Fun & joy
06Leadership
07Perseverance
08Craft
09Rigor

DeepMelon Technologies is the commercial vehicle building the engineering. Dolphin Democracy — the Friend who knows us well — holds the broader mission: charitable activity, public engagement, and the long-term advocacy work that doesn't fit inside a commercial venture but is essential to the field.

Both are part of the same architecture. Both are needed.