Terradepth is an Austin-area ocean-data and subsea-intelligence company founded in 2018 by former U.S. Navy SEALs Joe Wolfel and Judson Kauffman. It pairs autonomous underwater vehicles that collect seabed data with Absolute Ocean, a cloud-native, government-grade platform for storing, visualizing, sharing and analyzing that data. Marketed as Ocean-Data-as-a-Service (ODaaS), Terradepth serves defense, offshore energy and maritime customers who need to map, understand and protect the roughly three-quarters of the planet that lies underwater.
Ulysses is a San Francisco ocean-robotics company building low-cost, modular autonomous underwater vehicles that replace multimillion-dollar ships and human divers. Founded in 2023, it started by using robots to replant declining seagrass meadows 100x faster than volunteer divers, then extended the same modular platform to offshore wind surveys, subsea infrastructure inspection, and maritime security. Its flagship Mako AUV dives 5,000 feet for up to 72 hours and starts at roughly $50,000 - about 50x cheaper than legacy systems - and the company raised a $38M Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz in April 2026.
Apeiron Labs is a Cambridge, Massachusetts deep-tech company building the Tensor platform - large, low-cost networks of small autonomous underwater vehicles that persistently measure the upper 400 meters of the ocean. By making subsurface ocean data cheap and continuous instead of episodic and expensive, Apeiron sells real-time ocean intelligence as a service to defense, climate, offshore energy, aquaculture, and maritime customers. The company raised a $9.5M Series A in February 2026 and says it has already cut the cost of ocean data roughly 100-fold, with a goal of 1,000-fold.