Most of what we know about the ocean just skims the surface, literally. We have gathered a large quantity of data 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 is nothing like what we get from satellites today. This lack of information is frustrating to everyone from fishermen to the Coast Guard, meteorologists, and offshore wind developers.
Getting data from the subsurface ocean has always been very hard. It is really slow and expensive, requiring a ship that costs one hundred thousand dollars a day. Everything is an expedition. Ravi Pappu, founder and CEO of Apeiron Labs, hopes that his bobbing, autonomous underwater vehicle can change that. He founded the company in 2022 after a stint as CTO of In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital arm, where the lack of ocean data was a persistent problem.
To fill these gaps, Apeiron Labs is building low-cost vehicles that travel four hundred meters up and down the water column, sampling temperature, salinity, and acoustics once or twice per day. The company currently sells to both civilian and defense customers. To build and sell more of its autonomous underwater vehicles, Apeiron Labs recently closed a nine point five million dollar Series A funding round led by Dyne Ventures, RA Capital Management Planetary Health, and S2G Investments. Assembly Ventures, Bay Bridge Ventures, and TFX Capital also participated.
The startup’s autonomous underwater vehicles are three feet long, five inches in diameter, and just over twenty pounds. They can be deployed from boats or airplanes and, not coincidentally, fit into the U.S. Navy’s existing launch equipment. Once in the water, the vehicle gets its bearings and connects to a cloud-based operating system to log its data. While it dives, the operating system uses models of the ocean to predict where it will surface. When the vehicle breaches and reconnects, the software incorporates the new data to refine its models.
The vehicles are spaced about ten to twenty kilometers apart, forming a line or array that captures data in greater resolution than ship-based efforts. Apeiron envisions deploying dozens or hundreds of these vehicles for a range of customers. The Pentagon might use them to listen for submarines, while fisheries might want detailed temperature and salinity data about prime fishing waters. The goal is persistent monitoring in key parts of the ocean.
At its current scale, Apeiron has brought the cost of ocean data down by one hundred-fold. The goal is to reduce it by a factor of one thousand, a target the company believes it can hit next year. As Ravi Pappu states, they think of themselves as the CubeSat for the ocean.