Wilmington startup RCOAST is a coastal data layer and analysis company that collects high-resolution 3D data to track how coastlines change and help governments evaluate and plan resilience efforts.
The company is rooted in eastern North Carolina, where founder Dr. Christy Swann grew up visiting Topsail Beach and Surf City with her family. She caught her first fish with her father on a stretch of beach that has since been lost to erosion. But growing up, Swann never expected that connection to the coast to turn into a scientific career—much less a startup built around understanding how beaches change.
“I grew up going to the beach, which is a big part of our story,” Swann said. “We’re trying to save our beaches.”
As an undergraduate at East Carolina University, Swann joined a professor on a field experiment on the Outer Banks, where she helped install instruments measuring wind along a dune. When a gust nearly knocked her backward, she watched the very same gust appear as a spike in the data on her laptop. She describes the moment as an epiphany; fieldwork and data collection had hooked her.
“I got truly addicted to it from that moment,” Swann said. “I went on every field experiment that that professor and other professors in the department [offered].”
Swann went on to earn a master’s and doctorate studying coastal processes and developing sensors, one of which caught the attention of NASA’s Curiosity rover team and led to NASA-funded research testing sensors under simulated Martian conditions.
Following this, Swann spent seven years as a principal investigator at the Naval Research Laboratory, where her work studying coastal change for naval operations exposed the data gap that would eventually lead her to start RCOAST.
“I still sometimes can’t believe we have this big of a data gap because of all the decisions that are being made on our coasts and the amount of money that’s sitting there,” Dr. Swann said.
A heaping data gap
The problem Swann saw was not a lack of coastal modeling or engineering expertise. Rather, it was what those models and decisions were being built on.
Coastlines can change dramatically over relatively short periods, particularly in the wake of major storms. Yet Swann said data used to inform decisions about flood risk, insurance and coastal resilience is often years out of date.
“You can have the most sophisticated flood model that you want,” Swann said. “But if the data is multiple years old, then that means we are predicting for a scenario that has long passed.”
RCOAST is attempting to close that gap by creating a frequently updated, high-resolution data layer and record of what is actually happening along the coast. The company scans beaches four times a year and around major storms, allowing it to track seasonal changes and sudden erosion events.
At the center of that effort is light detection and ranging technology (LiDAR), which RCOAST mounts on drones to create precise 3D representations of coastlines. The startup’s flights also collect high-resolution imagery and multispectral data, giving the company additional information about features such as vegetation.
By comparing successive scans, RCOAST can measure where sand has accumulated or disappeared and how much a coastline has physically changed. The company uses its own scripts and machine-learning tools to process and georeference that data, then connects observed changes to natural effects—such as winds, waves, tides—and, subsequently, mitigation efforts such as sand fencing, vegetation and beach nourishment.
Predicting for communities
RCOAST has already put its model to work in South Padre Island, Texas, where it helped measure the effectiveness of a $1.2 million sand-fencing and vegetation project, using wind data to optimize the angle of the fencing. Within six months, the project had accumulated the equivalent of 426 dump trucks full of sand. The results helped South Padre secure state funding for continued monitoring, with Texas covering 75% of a two-year RCOAST project with an option to extend to five years.
RCOAST is now working across Texas, Louisiana, Florida, North Carolina and New York, while targeting Massachusetts as its sixth state. At the same time, it is expanding its database across coastlines with different geology, orientations, winds, waves and tides. This variety is needed to further build and validate the predictive model.
That all feeds into RCOAST’s larger vision. Swann describes the company’s second phase as “ChatGPT, but it’s anything about a coastline.” She envisions an AI interface wherein communities could pose questions about their coastline and receive hyper-local predictions about where to intervene and which resilience measures are most likely to work.
QUICK BITS
Startup: RCOAST
Founder: Christy Swann
Founded: 2022
Team size: 5
Location: Wilmington
Website: r-coast.com
Funding: Raising pre-seed
Longer term, RCOAST plans to move beyond primarily drone-based surveys and use small propeller planes to scan much larger stretches of coastline. Swann’s goal is to eventually survey the Southeast and Atlantic coasts four times a year before expanding to the West Coast and internationally.
“We want to be the trusted data source on every side of the equation because we are really freaking good at collecting good data, and our coastal communities need it,” Swann said.
