Tankless Dive Gear - Breath Autonomy at Sea, Land & Space
Hey everyone I´m Leo, the founder of DAIVIN!
TL;DR
Did you know, a single bottle of water contains enough oxygen to sustain a human for a day?
DAIVIN uses electrolysis to extract the oxygen from water and convert it into breathable gas for divers, enabling tankless underwater breathing limited only by battery duration.
Demo video: https://youtu.be/r5HfL8Bw0dw
👤 The Team
Hi I’m Leo, I’m an electrical engineer with seven years of experience in the electrical industry and the youngest person in Finland to achieve the highest national electrical certification, authorizing me to independently execute and sign off complex electrical power lines. I’m also a certified diver and served in the military.
❌ The Problem
Underwater diving technology hasn’t changed in almost 100 years, and is rife with problems:
- Intense oxygen tank logistics. Oxygen tanks hard-limit where, when, and how long a dive can happen. In elite and remote operations, logistics - not depth or physics - sets the limits on mobility, mission flexibility, safety, and cost.
- Unsafe by design: Pressurized gas systems add mass, failure modes, and cognitive load, making diving roughly 1,000× more dangerous than flying. DAIVIN! replaces stored gas with on-demand oxygen generated from water.
- Slow and exposed: Bulky gear forces divers to move ~5× slower than walking, extending task time and exposure. DAIVIN! reduces bulk and drag to restore underwater mobility.
- Cost-prohibitive Professional dive systems cost tens of thousands of dollars, with helium exceeding $100 per tank.
✅ Our Solution: Apply electricity to the water around you and dive safer, longer, and deeper than ever
DAIVIN! removes tanks entirely, enabling missions to start anywhere with a shoebox-sized system.
**Put on the vest:**
You wear a lightweight vest with triple-redundant electrolyzers.
**Strap on the batteries:**
A lightweight battery belt replaces the traditional weight belt. The system is quadruple-redundant at the circuitry level, meaning that even if a were to wire fail, three independent paths per electrolyzer maintain continuous gas generation.
Electrolyzing H₂O
Our device uses the resource you are already in: water. We apply traditional electrolysis, where DC current splits the water molecule (H₂O) into oxygen (O₂) for breathing and hydrogen (H₂), enabling deep diving to depths of 200 meters / 650 ft without nitrogen narcosis, oxygen toxicity or dependence on expensive helium.
**Dive Freely:**
If decompression is required, decompression time is reduced because hydrogen exits body tissues faster than nitrogen. If entangled, a single palm sized battery can provide up to one hour of additional breathing time. If operating remotely with no support team, recharge anywhere using solar power. No tank logistics. No cognitive load.
✨Future
Today, oxygen is treated as a logistics problem: moving heavy, pressurized gas from point A to point B. That framing is wrong. Oxygen is fundamentally an energy problem.
Where logistics break down, on-demand generation wins. In crisis zones or at high altitude, carrying tanks is a liability. It is far more efficient to carry - or source - water and convert it into oxygen when needed, whether for wounded personnel or climbers operating far from support.
The same logic applies to space. A pressurized oxygen tank is limited in gas supply, but water is abundant, and already present. In space, we won’t transport air; we’ll extract oxygen from ice.
Even in airplanes and hospitals, oxygen delivery still relies on bulky tanks or legacy systems like pressure swing adsorption that consume space and deliver lower purity oxygen. From first principles, water plus electricity yields the highest-purity oxygen possible.
We’ve been hauling the container when we should have been bringing the source.
🌊 How you can help!
- If you know professional or commercial divers, We´d love to speak with them.
- 📧 leo.kankkunen@daivin.tech
- Follow us on LinkedIn, X and check our Website
- Share this post!
How did your company get started? (i.e., How did the founders meet? How did you come up with the idea? How did you decide to be a founder?)
The idea started while diving. I surfaced, sat in a coffee shop, and asked a simple question: fish breathe underwater without tanks - why can’t humans? Diving gear is heavy, complex, and logistically constrained, yet the surrounding water already contains the oxygen we need. I looked into the physics and realized this wasn’t a biology problem, but an energy problem. By applying electricity to water, it’s possible to generate breathable oxygen on demand. That insight led me to start DAIVIN!. With support from my family and people along the journey, I committed full-time to turning that idea into a working system!
What is the core problem you are solving? Why is this a big problem? What made you decide to work on it?
The core problem is that human access to the ocean is still constrained by heavy, pressurized gas tanks. Diving depends on transporting, storing, and managing large volumes of breathing gas, which drives cost, complexity, and risk.
This is a big problem because tanks scale poorly. Supporting a single diver for hours can require dozens of cylinders weighing hundreds of kilograms / lbs, with significant capital cost, operating cost, and logistical overhead. These systems also introduce failure modes - equipment issues remain a major contributor to serious diving accidents.
I decided to work on this after diving myself and realizing the constraint isn’t oxygen availability, but how we access it. Water already contains the oxygen we need. If a diver can generate breathable oxygen on demand using water and electricity, tanks - and the risks and logistics that come with them - can be removed. That realization led me to build DAIVIN!
What is your long-term vision? If you truly succeed, what will be different about the world?
Our long-term vision is to eliminate oxygen tanks entirely and replace them with on-demand breathing from water. Oxygen should not be a logistics problem; it should be generated where it’s needed.
If we succeed, access to extreme environments changes fundamentally. In the ocean, in space, at high altitude, in crisis zones, hospitals, and aircraft, breathing will no longer depend on transporting and storing pressurized gas. It will depend on water and energy - resources that are far more abundant, safer, and cheaper.
This shift matters because water is everywhere and oxygen gas is not. In space, oxygen exists in ice. In the ocean, it’s in water. On mountains, it’s in snow. Treating oxygen as something to be hauled around in tanks is a legacy constraint.
Just as early semiconductor advances made computing ubiquitous, on-demand oxygen generation can unlock sustained human presence in environments that are currently difficult, dangerous, or inaccessible. Our goal is to make those environments reachable, scalable, and safe.
Check the dive video out here: https://youtu.be/r5HfL8Bw0dw
