Bedrock Ocean dredges up $25M to map the seafloor with robots

Summary

Oceans may cover more than 70% of the Earth’s surface, but we have better maps of the moon than we do the seabed. There are good reasons for that: The ocean floor is obscured, and the harsh environment makes it hard to send humans down to get a closer look. But as robots improve, we may finally get a clearer picture of the deep abyss. There are a number of startups racing to map the ocean in greater detail, but the latest to snag fresh funding is Bedrock Ocean, which recently closed a $25 million Series A-2 round led by Primary and Northzone, the company exclusively told TechCrunch. Autopilot, Costanoa Ventures, Harmony Partners, Katapult, and Mana Ventures participated. Bedrock Ocean has developed an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) that runs for up to 12 hours off its lithium-ion batteries while mapping the floor using its sonar and magnetic sensors. Traditionally, the ocean floor has been mapped by large ships, which blast powerful sonar pulses down into the water column. Those ships slurp fuel and require human operators, making them costly to sail, and they disrupt marine life. “The pot at the end of the rainbow that everybody has been chasing for 20 years has been, can we replace traditional ships?” Brandon Mah, co-founder and CEO of Bedrock Ocean, told TechCrunch. Bedrock Ocean’s AUVs are still launched from a ship, but once underwater, they operate independently from it. Two of them can cover the same ground as one traditional mapping ship, and one 40-foot ship could carry 10 to 12 of the AUVs, he said. Bedrock designs and builds its own AUVs, which Mah said cost less than $1 million apiece. The company also developed its own software both to operate the AUVs and to perform the mapping. The AUVs store data locally and perform some processing on board. When it’s time to transmit, they surface and send the data to the ship via Wi-Fi. A Starlink antenna aboard the ship can then beam that information to the cloud, where observers can keep an eye on things. “W...