Judson Kauffman

Who is Judson Kauffman

Judson Kauffman is a serial founder and a former US Navy SEAL who builds companies in industries most people never touch. He uses he and him. His pattern is to find a hard, physical problem, ocean data or an unmade spirit, and go build the company that solves it, rather than chase whatever is easy to fund that year.

From the Navy to McCombs

He enlisted in the Navy about two weeks after September 11, 2001. He did not start at the sharp end. He qualified in surface warfare as an intelligence analyst, then trained as a search and rescue swimmer, then went through SEAL training and served as a sniper, navigator and team leader. He deployed three times in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom, earned combat distinctions and three meritorious promotions, and later ran the Navy's Special Operations and Special Warfare Mentor Program. He served roughly ten years by his own account.

He met Joe Wolfel in SEAL training in 2004. They fought together in the early years of that war and have now co-founded two companies. That is the longest relationship in this story and it explains most of the rest of it.

Afterward he took an undergraduate business degree at Belmont in five semesters, then an MBA from McCombs at the University of Texas. He went to work as a VP of product development, then in 2012 co-founded Exbellum with Wolfel, a leadership and human capital consultancy built on how special operations teams are actually run. They sold it.

Leadership is a burden. Look deep inside yourself and ask why you want to be a leader.

Terradepth

The idea is older than the company. In 2005, a year into their SEAL careers, Kauffman and Wolfel were briefed on the USS San Francisco, a nuclear submarine that had run into an undersea mountain nobody had charted. A nine-thousand-ton submarine hit a mountain that was not on any map. That is the problem Terradepth exists to solve.

He co-founded it with Wolfel in 2018 and serves as co-CEO. The company is headquartered in Austin and builds autonomous underwater vehicles it calls Buddy Drones, which work in identical pairs, one diving to collect data while the other stays up top to relay it, then swapping. No ship, no crew sitting above them in the weather. The commercial version is rated to six thousand meters, can stay out for up to thirty days and places what it finds to within a meter. All of it feeds a cloud platform called Absolute Ocean, which is the actual product: a navigable digital twin of the seafloor.

Investors have backed it in stages, with $8 million raised at the end of 2019 in a round led by Seagate, and a $20 million Series A in early 2022 co-led by Giant Ventures and Nimble Ventures. Fast Company gave it an honorable mention in its 2021 Innovation by Design Awards.

Our systems don't rely on any offshore human support, which significantly reduces risk to humans and operating costs.

Desert Door

Desert Door started as a class project. In the summer of 2016 Kauffman met Ryan Campbell and Brent Looby in an MBA class at McCombs. All three were veterans, all three were Texans, and the thing they decided to build was a distillery for a spirit almost nobody outside the Chihuahuan Desert had heard of. Sotol is distilled from a desert plant, not agave, and people have been making it in Texas and northern Mexico for something close to a thousand years. Nobody had ever built a commercial sotol distillery in the United States.

They launched in November 2017 out of Driftwood, in the Hill Country south of Austin, distilling from the desert spoon plant that grows wild in West Texas. USA Today named it the best specialty craft spirit distillery in the country in both 2019 and 2020, and has twice ranked it the number one craft distillery in America. The Texas Business Hall of Fame gave Kauffman its veteran award in 2020. His role there is a founding and board one now; day-to-day leadership has passed to others, but the company he helped start is still pouring.

What he is building now

In 2025 he started Sovereign Materials, where he is founder and CEO. It recovers rare earth materials out of domestic electronic waste and refines them back into usable, defense-grade supply for energy, electronics and industrial buyers. The technical bench is serious, built around a chemical engineer with thirty years in the field and research partnerships with Columbia, UT and the University of Arizona. It is the same instinct as the other two: a physical problem, a supply chain nobody wants to think about, and a reason it matters strategically. He puts the combined value of the three companies above $300 million.

Alongside the companies he works as a certified coach and breathwork facilitator, and takes paid speaking work on leadership. The through line from a SEAL team to a boardroom is not the toughness. It is that he keeps choosing problems where the answer has to be physically built.

A good business simply makes money. To be excellent, you have to do more than just make money.