Most of what we know about the ocean just skims the surface, literally. We’ve gathered a large quantity of data on the oceans from satellites, but most of that is based on the top layer of water. Below that, the picture gets murkier.
Buoys, ships, and some autonomous rovers have recently added some detail, but it’s nothing like what we get from satellites today. It’s frustrating to everyone from fishermen to the Coast Guard, meteorologists to offshore wind developers.
“Getting data from the subsurface ocean has always been really hard,” Ravi Pappu, founder and CEO of Apeiron Labs, told TechCrunch. “It’s really slow. You need a ship that costs $100,000 a day, [and] steams out slowly. Everything’s an expedition.”
Pappu hopes that his bobbing, autonomous underwater vehicle can change that. He founded Apeiron Labs in 2022 after a stint as CTO of In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital arm. There, the lack of data on the ocean was “a persistent problem” that kept coming up.
To fill the gaps, Apeiron Labs is building low-cost vehicles that travel 400 meters up and down the water column (the vertical section of ocean from surface to seafloor), sampling temperature, salinity, and acoustics once or twice per 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 exclusively told TechCrunch. 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 into the U.S. Navy’s existing launch equipment. Once the AUV hits the water, it gets its bearings and connects to a cloud-based operating system, where it logs its data.
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