Despite decades of satellite monitoring, much of what humanity knows about the ocean is limited to its surface. Below that top layer, data becomes scarce, fragmented, and expensive to collect, creating challenges for industries ranging from fishing and weather forecasting to national security and offshore energy.
“Getting data from the subsurface ocean has always been really hard,” Ravi Pappu, founder and CEO of Apeiron Labs, said. “It’s really slow. You need a ship that costs $100,000 a day, and everything becomes an expedition.”
To solve this problem, Apeiron Labs is developing low-cost autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) designed to continuously collect ocean data without the need for research vessels. The startup was founded in 2022 by Pappu, formerly the CTO of In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital arm, where the lack of subsurface ocean data was a recurring concern.
Apeiron’s AUVs move up and down the water column, the vertical stretch from the ocean surface to the seafloor, reaching depths of up to 400 meters. The vehicles collect temperature, salinity, and acoustic data once or twice per day. According to Pappu, the company currently serves both civilian and defense customers.
To scale production and deployment, Apeiron Labs has raised a $9.5 million Series A round led by Dyne Ventures, RA Capital Management Planetary Health, and S2G Investments. Assembly Ventures, Bay Bridge Ventures, and TFX Capital also participated in the round, the company told TechCrunch.
The AUVs are compact, measuring about three feet long, five inches in diameter, and weighing just over 20 pounds. They can be deployed from boats or airplanes and are compatible with existing U.S. Navy launch equipment. Once deployed, each vehicle connects to a cloud-based operating system that logs and processes its data.
As the AUV dives, the system predicts where it will resurface using ocean models. When it reconnects after surfacing, the newly collected data is used to further refine those models. The vehicles are typically spaced 10 to 20 kilometers apart, forming arrays that provide far higher resolution data than traditional ship-based surveys.
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Apeiron envisions deploying dozens or even hundreds of AUVs for persistent ocean monitoring. Potential use cases include detecting submarines for defense agencies, as well as providing fisheries with more accurate data on temperature and salinity in prime fishing zones.
Pappu said the company has already reduced the cost of collecting ocean data by 100 times and aims to bring that figure down by a factor of 1,000 as early as next year. He likened Apeiron’s approach to small satellites used in space exploration.
“We think of ourselves as the CubeSat for the ocean,” Pappu said.
Update: This article was updated to clarify that Apeiron Labs raised $9.5 million, not $29 million.
