More than 80 percent of the ocean floor remains unmapped. Although it is home to an estimated 50 to 80 percent of life on earth, the dark, cold abyss of the deep sea —and what resides there — is largely a mystery.
Terradepth wants to change that.
The Austin-based startup wants to “drain the ocean of ignorance” with a fleet of autonomous underwater robots that will travel the ocean blue and gather data, becoming the world’s first deep sea data-as-a-service business. Today, the company announced it has raised $8 million in funding from storage hardware company, Seagate Technology.
Terradepth’s data collection vehicles, called “Autonomous Hybrid Vehicles,” or AvX, will have two jobs, according to the company’s website. While operating at sea, one robot will stay at the surface, collecting data and providing navigation assistance. The second robot will be submerged and gathering data beneath the waves. Since the vehicles will be unmanned, the company says it can operate at a higher scale with a lower cost.
The data these vehicles gather will be sent to satellites and housed on a cloud-based repository that subscribers can search through. Customers can either download the data raw, or run it through Terradepth’s own machine-learning analytics layer. The company aims to offer everything from ultra-high resolution geophysical surveys to monitoring and forecasting services for offshore equipment.
Terradepth’s co-founders, Joe Wolfel and Judson Kauffman, are both ex-Navy SEALs. Their small team include ocean engineers, subsea roboticists and scientists.
According Tech Crunch, the company plans to use this most recent funding to show their technology at work in the open water by next summer. Going forward, it hopes to scale its operations by the following year and operate an entire networked fleet of autonomous submersible vehicles.
“We believe that a deeper understanding of the oceans is achievable through technological advancement in robotic autonomy,” Terradepth says. “A deeper understanding of our oceans is critical to informed decision-making and valuable to a wide range of ocean stakeholders.”
