Founders Story

Early Roots

Seaward Automation began long before the name existed. It started with two people growing up in the same corner of Connecticut, both shaped by hands-on work and hard problems.

John Digertt was raised in a family of sportfishing fanatics and spent his summers offshore chasing giant tuna with his father. Life on the water taught him awareness and respect for complex systems in motion. On land, he pushed toward entrepreneurship early, helping scale his family’s business and developing an instinct for operations and leadership.

Just miles away, Brian Pracon was raised by the torch. Coming from a family of welders, he learned how metal behaves, how structures fail, and how to solve problems with precision. That environment built him into someone who could handle large industrial projects with confidence and calm execution.

Both came from different backgrounds but shared the same wiring. Build what does not exist yet, and build it the right way.

A Shared Path

They eventually crossed paths through the dirt biking community and immediately recognized how well their strengths aligned. John thought like a founder. Brian thought like an engineer who could turn vision into durable hardware. Together they moved quickly, and more importantly, they executed.

That chemistry led to Hashatron, a hardware startup in the cannabis space. With a blend of entrepreneurial drive, controls engineering, and manufacturing know-how, they developed the first solventless hash extractor and achieved adoption across the country. It proved what they already felt. They worked best when solving hard problems together.

A Bigger Challenge

When the cannabis rush faded, John and Brian looked for their next frontier. They wanted something harder, something with real-world impact, something where their background in automation, controls, and industrial systems could reshape an entire category.

They found it on the water.

Modern boats are more complex than ever, yet most systems still operate in isolation. Owners and captains rely on scattered hardware, siloed data, and outdated interfaces. The industry needed something it had never truly seen before. A unified brain. A platform capable of tying every system together.

Both saw that gap clearly. Both knew they could build the solution.

Building Seaward Automation

That idea became Seaward Automation.

John brought nationwide experience in industrial and marine automation. He became the systems architect behind the Command platform, driving product vision, OEM strategy, and the overall technical roadmap. His role blends engineering depth with strong customer-facing instinct, shaping what Command is today.

Brian brought more than 15 years in manufacturing, commercial execution, and organizational growth. He built the operational backbone of Seaward, ensuring reliable deployments, consistent customer success, and a scalable structure that keeps engineering, field operations, and product development aligned.

Together, they understood how sensors speak, how networks behave, how systems integrate, and how to build hardware that performs under pressure. Marine automation was not just a new opportunity. It was the inevitable next step.

Today, Seaward Automation is building toward a simple idea. Boats should be smarter. Monitoring should be real time. Control should be intuitive. Data should be accessible from anywhere. And every system on board should operate as one.

This is the team building the next generation of marine automation. This is how Seaward started. And this is only the beginning.

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