Vakaros Wins the World Sailing 2025 Technology Award
Vakaros has just won the World Sailing Technology Award 2025, and although the news alone could headline any publication, the real story starts long before the spotlight: back in 2016, in the overlap between two engineers, a sport they loved, and a problem no one else had solved.
Todd Wilson and Jake Keilman met through F18 sailing. They were passionate, competitive, and increasingly frustrated. They were trying to get faster, but the instruments available at the time for small performance boats were limited, outdated, and clumsy. The displays couldn’t even be read with polarized sunglasses; data could be collected, but you needed a computer afterwards to download everything. Running and cycling had already embraced modern, connected tech. Sailing hadn’t. And so the question that changed everything arrived naturally: why not build something better?
They started sketching ideas, writing early versions of what would become the Atlas software, and trying to imagine what an instrument built for sailors, rather than adapted from something else, could look like. The idea was ambitious: real-time speed, angle, heel, trim, timing, and a large graphical display that could evolve with software updates long after the device was purchased. The vision required an extremely flexible platform and years of engineering. During this time, Jake was in graduate school and Todd was working full-time as a software engineer. Progress was slow, but relentless.
By 2018, the concept had grown into something real enough to prototype. With limited funds and a basement serving as headquarters, they launched a Kickstarter-style pre-order campaign. They weren’t sure anyone would buy a product that existed only in
renders. But sailors did, and quickly. Those early customers essentially willed Vakaros into existence. Even with manufacturing delays and supplier setbacks, Todd and Jake delivered the first Atlas 1 units in 2019, earning loyalty that still defines the Vakaros community today.
The company grew from there. Investment arrived. The Atlas evolved. And the idea that had been lingering since 2018, automating race management, slowly crystallized into RaceSense. To make it possible, Vakaros needed hardware far more advanced than anything in the market. This led to the development of the Atlas 2, launched in 2021 and delivered in 2022, featuring a dual-band GNSS receiver, long-range radio, and an architecture powerful enough to host features that didn’t exist yet.
RaceSense arrives
When RaceSense launched in 2023, it marked a quiet revolution. For decades, race management depended on hand timers, flags, horns, shouted instructions, human judgement, and a stopwatch held on a wet committee boat. RaceSense turned this entire system into a synchronized digital ecosystem. Every boat carries an Atlas instrument, which communicates over a proprietary mesh network. The race committee inputs the course and commands, and every device on the race course, committee boats, marks, competitors, stays synchronized to the microsecond.
RaceSense determines OCS instantly. It eliminates the need for sailors to ping the line. It gives the race committee live boat positions, not only for race control but also for safety. In a whiteout thunderstorm off the Atlantic coast, a race officer was able to track fifty scattered boats and confirm one by one that they were safe. In Croatia, at the Star Worlds, RaceSense managed a line of 101 boats with total
precision. In Muskegon, Michigan, club night racing now runs with the same timing reliability as a World Championship.
Since launching the Atlas 2, the team has grown significantly, all contributing their expertise. RaceSense is the result of years of hard work, iteration, and passion from a dedicated and expanding team committed to transforming race management worldwide.
In 2025, RaceSense reached a level of maturity that changed the global conversation. Vakaros introduced real-time differential GNSS corrections, improving positional accuracy to well under 25 centimeters. The platform expanded its capacity to fleets of over two hundred boats. It integrated mark-zone detection. It delivered cloud-enabled tracking for spectators and real-time data for coaches. And it did all of this without requiring expensive infrastructure or specialized broadcasts, just a single internet connection on the course.
The latest innovation is the new, 1 centimeter accurate Atlas HALO RTK, which makes Grand-prix level race management available to the entire sport. Building on the existing RaceSense infrastructure, HALO utilizes Real-Time Kinematic GNSS positioning to deliver unmatched accuracy for the most demanding fleets, while maintaining the ease of use and affordability that RaceSense is known for.
Between October 2024 and September 2025, RaceSense supported more than 250 events. The scale is unprecedented: world championships in Star, J/70, Etchells, RS21 and Melges fleets, along with major regattas across Europe, North America, South America, Japan, and Australia. More than 6,000 sailors used it. Over 50,000 start determinations were executed, more than any other race management technology in the world, including major professional leagues.
And it all goes back to the first improvised test, at four in the morning, on a quiet street in Miami, with a backpack full of prototypes and two engineers wondering if this idea might go somewhere.
Winning the World Sailing Technology Award 2025 is not just a recognition of RaceSense; it’s a recognition of what sailing can become when innovation is accessible, scalable, and built by people who truly understand the sport. What began as two sailors trying to get faster in an F18 has become a system now used from Optimists to TP52s, from local clubs to world championships, from training sessions to high-stakes regattas.
And through it all, the mission has stayed the same: push boundaries, expand possibilities, and give sailors tools that make the sport better, fairer, safer, and more exciting.
RaceSense represents that mission at its best and the 2025 Technology Award is proof that the sailing world agrees.
