Most of what we know about the ocean is just above the surface, literally. We have collected a large amount of ocean data from satellites, but most of it is based on the upper layer of water. Below that, the image gets darker.
Buoys, ships and some autonomous rovers have recently added some detail, but nothing like what we get from satellites today. It’s frustrating for everyone from fishermen to the Coast Guard, meteorologists to offshore wind developers.
“Getting data from the subsurface ocean has always been very difficult,” said Ravi Pappu, founder and CEO of Apeiron Labshe told TechCrunch. “It’s too slow. You need a ship that costs $100,000 a day, [and] evaporates slowly. Everything is a mission.”
Pappu hopes his autonomous underwater vehicle can change that. He founded Apeiron Labs in 2022 after a stint as CTO of In-Q-Tel, the venture capital arm of the CIA. There, the lack of ocean data was “a persistent problem” that kept coming up.
To fill in the gaps, Apeiron Labs is building low-cost vehicles that travel 400 meters up and down the water column (the vertical part of the ocean from the surface to the sea floor), sampling temperature, salinity and acoustics once or twice a day. Apeiron currently sells to both civilian and defense customers, Pappu said.
To build and sell more of its autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), Apeiron Labs recently closed a $9.5 million Series A round led by Dyne Ventures, RA Capital Management Planetary Health and S2G Investments, the company told TechCrunch exclusively. Assembly Ventures, Bay Bridge Ventures and TFX Capital participated.
At three feet long, five inches in diameter and just over 20 pounds, the startup’s AUVs can be deployed from boats or airplanes. Not coincidentally, they also fit the US Navy’s existing launch equipment. Once the AUV hits the water, it takes its bearings and connects to a cloud-based operating system where it records its data.
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While diving, the operating system uses models of the ocean to predict where it will appear. When the AUV finally breaks through and reconnects with the operating system, the cloud-based software incorporates the new data to improve its models. The AUVs are spaced about 10 km to 20 km (6.2 mi to 12.4 mi) apart, forming a line or array that captures data at a higher resolution than ship-based efforts.
Apeiron envisions deploying dozens or hundreds of its AUVs for a range of customers. The Pentagon might use them to listen for submarines off the US coast, while fisheries might want to get more detailed temperature and salinity data about prime fishing waters. The goal is persistent monitoring at key points in the ocean.
Pappu said that at Apeiron’s current scale, it has reduced the cost of ocean data by 100 times. He wants to reduce that by 1,000 and believes Apeiron can achieve that goal next year. Referring to a type of low-cost small satellite, Pappu adds, “We see ourselves as the CubeSat for the ocean.”
Update 10am ET: The headline has been updated to reflect that Apeiron raised $9.5 million, not $29 million.
