The day we should have stayed home.
Boxing Day, 2023. Three of us drove to Maroubra at 6am because the swell forecast said clean 1.2m. We got there to a 2.4m mess and a closed beach. We turned around. Two hours of driving for nothing. On the way home we asked the question that started RipCo: why isn't this information in our pocket already?
It turns out the data exists. The Bureau of Meteorology has it. Surf Life Saving NSW publishes it. Camera networks broadcast it. But it lives in fifteen different places, none of them designed to answer the simple question: is this beach worth the drive today?
So we built RipCo. One screen. The data already exists. The decision was buried.
In late 2024 we added the AI rip-detection layer because the camera feeds we were already pulling had information no human was watching frame-by-frame. Now they are. And the model gets better every week.
We're a team of four, in Sydney, with no investors and no advertising on the app. We charge nothing. We collect almost no data. We answer support emails ourselves. If you write to us, you'll get one of us back within a day.