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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While it dives, the operating system uses models of the ocean to predict where it will surface. When the AUV finally breaches and reconnects with the operating system, the cloud-based software incorporates the new data to refine its models. The AUVs are spaced about 10 km to 20 km apart (6.2 miles to 12.4 miles), forming a line or array that captures data in greater 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 coast of the U.S., while fisheries might want to receive more detailed temperature and salinity data about prime fishing waters. The goal is persistent monitoring in key parts of the ocean.
Pappu said that at Apeiron’s current scale, it has brought the cost of ocean data down by 100-fold. He wants to get it down by a factor of 1,000, and he thinks Apeiron can hit that target next year. Referencing a type of small, low-cost satellite, Pappu adds: “We think of ourselves as the CubeSat for the ocean.”