Andy Rebele didn’t just drift away from Seattle’s maritime startup scene after the demise of Pure Watercraft, the electric propulsion company he spent 13 years building. He put in motion a plan to innovate again.
A little over a year after Pure shut down and sold off its assets, Rebele is the founder and CEO of Thallios, a new company with a new mission.
“This is a company that’s born out of the legacy of Pure Watercraft,” Rebele told GeekWire.
Pure’s main product and intellectual property was its electric outboard motor, used to power, among other things, an innovative pontoon boat directed at leisure boaters.
But the company also had assets across other marine interests, including military-related technology — which is the backbone of Thallios, where Rebele and a small team of former Pure employees are focused on autonomous marine craft.
“We acquired all of the military oriented IP,” Rebele said, adding that Pure previously completed a military contract where it built an electric personal watercraft designed for search and rescue. The acquisition comes with a contract that Pure partially executed and that Thallios will take on with the Defense Department’s Defense Innovation Unit.
Thallios, which is based at an undisclosed Seattle location but incorporated in Texas, will be building a small, autonomous surface craft that could be a boat or a personal-sized craft like a Jet Ski. Rebele said electric propulsion could be employed, and the craft’s main applications could be either logistical, like taking supplies from point A to B, or one-way missions, like sending a boat “that doesn’t come home,” he said, implying explosive capabilities.
“The way to think about this is analogous to the airborne drone theater,” Rebele said. “If you look at Ukraine, what has revolutionized war fighting in the last two or three years has been that small attritable drones have dominated.”
The mission is a departure from Pure’s onetime aim to disrupt the gas-powered recreational boating industry with a more environmentally friendly electric outboard motor.
Founded in 2011, Pure Watercraft raised $37 million and attracted backing from General Motors, which acquired a 25% stake in the company in November 2021. The startup won Sustainable Innovation of the Year at the 2023 GeekWire Awards.
But even with GM’s investment and the launch of a Pure Pontoon boat to appeal to a wide swath of American leisure boaters, the startup ran into financial troubles and was placed into receivership in July 2024.
Rebele has taken his time to reflect on what went wrong, why GM pulled out, and how much blame he should take.
“I really haven’t gone into depth on what happened with Pure, but I will say that its failure, while precipitated in the moment by an action by GM, a lot of responsibility for that was failures of execution by Pure,” he said. “And if we were to do it again, there are many things I would do differently.”
Rebele is excited to come at a new startup with a different tack. Foremost is his enthusiasm around not having to do any fundraising.
“We have no need to raise money, because the current military contract funds the company,” he said, adding that most startup CEOs he talks to spend 70% of their time courting investors. It’s time he’d rather spend focused on execution at Thallios.
“Most CEOs, including myself, are decent at lots of things. They’re not the best at anything,” Rebele said. “When you’re not busy knocking on investor doors, the hands-on work you do can relieve the need to hire multiple different positions.”
Thallios will need to stake out its territory in defense tech and learn what value it can bring compared to others who have been in the sector for a while.
In the Seattle area, a number of startups are innovating on behalf of the military: Overland AI spun out of the University of Washington to make self-driving vehicles; Kirkland, Wash.-based Echodyne makes advanced radar technology; and Exia Labs builds AI software to improve wargaming efforts.
A new Renton, Wash.-based accelerator program, called the Defense Technology Accelerator, also launched earlier this year with the goal of identifying and supporting startups and technologies that address Defense Department needs.
In Rebele’s opinion, too many companies have gone too high tech and he’s not interested in making “gold-plated” defense assets to go up against high-volume, lower-cost products from American and Allied adversaries. Cost and rapid production scalability will be key to Thallios’ success.
“We can’t have our Lamborghinis fighting their VW Beetles,” he said. “I think it’s tempting for new defense tech companies to slip down that slope.”
Previously:
- New electric boat club in Seattle launches with assets acquired in wake of Pure Watercraft demise
- Electric boating insiders react to Pure Watercraft’s demise as court documents reveal sell-off details
- GM-backed startup’s quiet electric pontoon boat is a conversation starter during Seattle joy rides
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