"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,"
Satellite observations capture extensive ocean-surface data but leave subsurface waters poorly characterized. Surface buoys, research ships, and autonomous rovers provide additional subsurface measurements, yet coverage remains sparse and costly. Apeiron Labs is producing low-cost, bobbing autonomous underwater vehicles that travel about 400 meters vertically to sample temperature, salinity, and acoustics once or twice daily. The AUVs measure roughly three feet long, five inches in diameter, and about twenty pounds, allowing deployment from boats or airplanes and compatibility with existing naval launch equipment. The company secured $9.5 million in Series A funding to scale production and sales.
Read at TechCrunch
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