To our customers, resellers, and supporters,
By way of introduction, I’m Jay Leon, and I'm excited to step into the role of CEO at Velocitek and help lead the company at a moment when race management technology is challenging the sport of sailboat racing. Drawing on my background in business, marketing, and competitive sailing, I’m committed to advancing tools and partnerships that improve the sport for everyone on the water.
Board members Tom Hutton, Stan Honey and I have assembled a dedicated group of investors that together with founder Alec Stewart and the Velocitek team are building a company with the capacity to guide Velocitek through these times.
We have been developing, and real world testing, the Velocitek RTK Puck for three years and will be introducing it and our race management system at elite events around the world this summer.
In this letter I will try to share what we have learned through this experience and what we plan to bring to the sailboat racing community in the near future.
GPS Technology is a Miracle of Engineering
At its introduction GPS was seen as a miracle. It was infinitely easier and quite a bit more accurate than the technology it replaced. It continuously calculated positions by measuring relative distances from satellites to a precision of within a few meters. Since then, modern software has made GPS precision seem more accurate by averaging positions and snapping them to known features on maps. But when accuracy matters, on a real estate survey, or when landing a plane, or on the starting line of a sailboat race, the limits of conventional GPS are apparent to everyone.
Recognizing this, the organizers of the 2024 Olympic Games followed the example of Stan Honey in the America’s Cup and adopted RTK GPS, GPS with local corrections, for their sailing starting system. Yet deploying RTK GPS proved far harder than anticipated, and the selected vendor was ultimately unable to deliver a working system in Marseille. Meanwhile, that same summer, our Velocitek team and development partners at the New York Yacht Club, successfully demonstrated that a centimeter-accurate RTK GPS system could fully automate sailboat race starts.
One Miracle After Another
Engineers long ago proved it was possible to catch signals from satellites 12,000 miles away traveling 9,000 miles per hour and use them to determine a position on earth within a few meters. So it is tempting to think of RTK GPS as mostly GPS with some corrections added. Like many engineering challenges however, it is the last 10% that eats up 90% of the effort. And as everyone saw in Marseille, deploying RTK GPS is a much higher order engineering challenge. When Stan Honey led the team that built that first RTK GPS starting line solution for the 2013 Americas Cup, he needed two large equipment cases to hold all of the equipment. He needed a team of engineers to run it, and it was so expensive that only the America's Cup could greenlight such a project. All for a race with only two boats.
By the summer of 2024, Velocitek's founder, Alec Stewart, and his dedicated team had reduced Stan's team’s solution to a device the size of a softball, which could be operated by one engineer, and successfully judge sailboat racing starts with 20 boats. It was a stunning accomplishment, still not duplicated by anyone else in the market. Since then, the Velocitek RTK Puck has been tested in dozens of events in the US and Europe to the delight of our board member and advisor, Stan Honey himself, along with Olympic level race officers including Tom Duggan at the 2025 Rolex New York Yacht Club Invitational Cup.
A New Chapter for Velocitek
After 20 years of pioneering engineering in sailboat racing instruments, Alec Stewart stepped away from the day to day management of Velocitek at the end of 2025. As the new CEO, I have inherited the title and the stewardship of the immense reserve of goodwill that Alec and his team have built in our community. I am grateful for the chance to work with our senior and seasoned team and alongside our many technical and industry advisors, including Alec.
Over the winter our team has been working hard to build upon these successes. And in the weeks ahead we will be announcing a steady stream of hardware and software advances and new delivery partnerships. At present we have over 150 racing days on our 2026 calendar and are in discussions to expand our services beyond automated starting to finishes, data and analytics, training and testing.
We are producing RTK Pucks as fast as we can and are collaborating with regatta organizers to produce world class events. If you want to discuss working with us on your event, click here to get the process started.
2027 and Beyond
The RTK GPS component makers are delivering a steady stream of breakthroughs that will make our 2027 version far superior to the Pucks we are building right now. Along with our partners, we will keep you up to date with these developments and how we will work to use these changes to improve our sport.
Technology is changing more sports than sailboat racing. Computers are calling the lines in tennis, and experiments are underway to have computers call balls and strikes in baseball. Drones flew behind the skiers in the winter olympics this year and AI is lowering the production cost for every type of sports broadcasting.
Our dedicated team has the energy, ideas, and industry relationships to distill these many changes into advances for our sport. Every person involved in our company is deeply embedded in the sailboat racing community. In between delivering our orders and event commitments, our team members also contribute to the sport through clubs, governing bodies, and standards committees. We help introduce new people to our community of sailors and coach young sailors.
Finally, Velocitek could never have accomplished any of this, and gotten into a position to lead the industry, without the support of our tens of thousands of customers. Our products do very complicated things, but we build them to do so without requiring you to read a manual or dig through menus. We have done this together with you and for this we thank you.
