Most of what we know about the ocean just skims the surface, literally. We have collected a lot of data on the ocean from satellites, but most of it is based on the upper layer of water. Below that, the picture gets murkier.
Buoys, ships, and some autonomous rovers have them recently added some detail, but not as much as what we receive 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,” Ravi Pappu, founder and CEO of Apeiron Labstold TechCrunch. “It’s really slow. You need a ship that costs $100,000 a day, (and) it’s slow going out. Everything is an expedition.
Pappu hopes that autonomous underwater vehicles can change that. He founded Apeiron Labs in 2022 after serving as CTO of In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital arm. There, the lack of data on the oceans is a persistent “persistent problem”.
To fill that gap, Apeiron Labs built an inexpensive vehicle that travels 400 meters up and down the water column (the vertical section of the ocean from the surface to the seabed), sampling temperature, salinity, and acoustics once or twice a day. Apeiron currently sells to civilian and defense customers, Pappu said.
To build and sell more 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 exclusively told TechCrunch. Assembly Ventures, Bay Bridge Ventures, and TFX Capital participated.
Three feet long, five inches in diameter, and weighing more than 20 pounds, the initial AUV can be deployed from a boat or plane. Incidentally, they also match the US Navy’s launch equipment. Once the AUV reaches the water, it will get a bearing and connect to a cloud-based operating system, where the data is logged.
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When diving, the operating system uses an ocean model to predict where it will surface. When the AUV finally breaks through and reconnects with the operating system, cloud-based software integrates new data to refine its model. AUVs are about 10 km to 20 km (6.2 miles to 12.4 miles) away, forming a line or array that captures data at a greater resolution than ship-based efforts.
Apeiron envisions deploying dozens or hundreds of AUVs to multiple customers. The Pentagon may use it to listen to submarines off the US coast, while fisheries may want to receive more detailed temperature and salinity data on prime fishing waters. Its purpose is continuous monitoring of important parts of the sea.
Pappu says that at Apeiron’s current scale, the cost of ocean data has dropped 100-fold. They want to drop it by a factor of 1,000, and they think Apeiron can hit that target next year. Referring to the small and cheap type of satellite, Pappu added: “We consider ourselves a CubeSat for the ocean.”
Update 10 a.m. ET: The headline has been updated to reflect that Apeiron raised $9.5 million, not $29 million.