What biofouling costs the shipping industry a year. Levi Gershon, 23, built the fix.
Levi Gershon took an unusual road to the ocean. He is an MIT graduate and a former motorsports powertrain lead, someone who came up obsessing over how to squeeze more efficiency out of an engine. Then he pointed that same instinct at one of the least glamorous, most consequential problems on Earth: the bottoms of ships.
Here is the problem he found. A ship's hull collects biofouling, marine growth that adds weight and drag, and drag burns fuel on the vessels that move almost everything you own. Cleaning it normally means putting divers in the water, and the buildup quietly costs the shipping industry around 25 billion dollars a year.
So Gershon built CRABI, the Crud Removal Autonomous Brushing Instrument, a tetherless robot that cleans hulls while ships are in transit. His company, CRABI Robotics, says it can cut a vessel's fuel use by 9 to 17 percent, which at scale could keep more than 100 million tons of CO2 out of the air. The work made him a 776 Foundation climate fellow and landed him on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list.
"The best problems are the invisible ones everyone forgot to solve."
That is the kind of problem worth chasing, unglamorous, physical, hidden below the waterline, which is exactly why it stayed open long enough for a 23-year-old to build the answer. The biggest opportunities are rarely the obvious ones. They are the boring, essential ones no one wanted to touch.
This is the builder instinct ANF keeps spotlighting. Find the essential problem everyone ignored, and go build the fix, even if it lives at the bottom of a ship.
The world runs on ships. A 23-year-old is keeping them clean.