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 information comes from 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 the comprehensive data we get from satellites. This lack of information is frustrating for everyone from fishermen to the Coast Guard, and from meteorologists to offshore wind developers.
Getting data from the subsurface ocean has always been very difficult. It is a slow and expensive process, often requiring a ship that costs a hundred thousand dollars a day. Everything is an expedition. Ravi Pappu, founder and CEO of Apeiron Labs, hopes that his company’s bobbing, autonomous underwater vehicle can change that. He founded Apeiron Labs in 2022 after a stint as CTO of In-Q-Tel, where the lack of ocean data was a persistent problem.
To fill these gaps, Apeiron Labs is building low-cost vehicles that travel 400 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 9.5 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 20 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.
These vehicles are spaced about 10 to 20 kilometers apart, forming a line or array that captures data in greater resolution than traditional ship-based efforts. Apeiron envisions deploying dozens or hundreds of its vehicles for a range of customers. The Pentagon might use them to listen for submarines, while fisheries might want detailed temperature and salinity data for 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 one hundredfold. He wants to reduce it by a factor of one thousand and believes Apeiron can hit that target next year. He adds, “We think of ourselves as the CubeSat for the ocean.”