HATCH
SYSTEMS
Born at sea.
Built for those who push the limits.
OUR STORY
Built on the Edge: The Origin of Hatch Systems
In the summer of 2023, Berenice Charrez was one of ten crew members aboard a 65-foot sailboat competing in The Ocean Race—the most extreme offshore sailing competition on Earth. Over weeks at sea, the crew battled towering waves, freezing winds, and relentless exhaustion. Sleep came in four-hour shifts, a system never truly optimized for recovery or performance.
Near Gibraltar, the crew encountered orcas—known to attack and sink sailboats. The team went on high alert. It was all hands on deck for hours, and Berenice missed an entire sleep shift. It took her two days to recover. During that time, she felt foggy, slow, and not at her best. Thankfully, nothing went wrong. But in that environment, it easily could have. In high-stakes settings like this, even minor lapses in focus or reaction can result in catastrophic outcomes—a broken mast, a collision with a reef, or worst of all: a person overboard.
That experience exposed a critical gap:
There’s no real-time system to monitor human readiness in extreme environments.
And this isn’t unique to offshore racing.
Wildland firefighters. Military forces. Mountaineers. Pilots. Deep-sea crews. Mine workers.
All operate in high-pressure, high-consequence settings— where human performance and safety are intertwined and where missing a single warning sign can lead to serious consequences.
That’s why Hatch Systems was founded.
To protect people operating at the edge.
To help leaders act before it’s too late.
To give organizations real-time visibility into performance and safety—even in the most remote and demanding environments.
Anytime. Anywhere.
— Berenice Charrez, founder of Hatch Systems
MEET THE FOUNDER
Founder & CEO
Bérénice Charrez (PhD)
Bérénice is a Swiss-born PhD in Bioengineering (UC Berkeley) and former postdoctoral fellow at the Wyss Institute at Harvard, where she led research on human metabolism and hibernation compounds. She is also a professional offshore sailor, having competed in the 2022–23 Ocean Race with Team Viva México. With over 30,000 nautical miles sailed and a background in extreme physiology, she now leads Hatch Systems, Inc., a company she founded to enhance human performance and safety in the world’s most demanding environments.
DISCOVER CURRENT PROJECTS
SAILING
Currently developing technologies that support human performance and safety in offshore sailing by combining biometric monitoring with real-time data analysis.
Hatch Systems provides continuous insight into sleep, stress, recovery, and metabolic load in one of the most extreme operational environments. Machine-learning-based sleep detection enables objective quantification of sleep duration and quality, while combined biometric and environmental data inform personalised nutrition and hydration strategies under sustained physical and cognitive stress. Hatch works with elite sailing teams and races, collecting physiological data to optimize crew workload, nutrition, or sleep rotations. Some of those races include The Vendee Globe 2024-2025, The Ocean Race Europe 2025 with Team Holcim-PRB, The Transat Cafe l'Or with several teams and the Jules Vernes Trophy with The Famous Project.
WIDER PROJECTS
Hatch Systems delivers a distributed, edge-first physiological monitoring platform designed for high-risk, remote, disrupted operational environments, and is well-positioned to support teams who operate under sustained physical, cognitive, and environmental stress with limited connectivity and minimal medical support. Hatch converts multimodal biometric data into real-time, human-interpretable indicators on a simple, color-coded dashboard accessible via any tablet.
Our field-tested platform was developed with ruggedness, long autonomy, flexible integration, and standalone capabilities, to answer the needs of forward combat units, wildland firefighting teams, search-and-rescue squads or perioperative staff.
The team includes MDs and PhDs from leading U.S. universities with backgrounds in bioengineering, mathematics, software and hardware engineering, and operational medicine. Many team members regularly work in austere environments, ensuring the technology is designed for real-world constraints.
