ocean-data
(7)
Terradepth
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.
Joe Wolfel
Joe Wolfel is the co-founder and CEO of Terradepth, a Cedar Park, Texas company building an ocean data ecosystem that pairs autonomous underwater robots with a cloud platform to turn fragmented subsea readings into decision-ready intelligence for commercial and government customers. A U.S. Naval Academy graduate and former Navy SEAL, Wolfel started the company in 2018 with fellow SEAL Judson Kauffman after concluding that humanity's ignorance of the ocean was a solvable data problem. He frames Terradepth less as a robotics maker and more as an 'Ocean Operating System,' shifting the maritime industry from buying platforms to buying the intelligence those platforms generate.
Valtec
Valtec is a San Diego-founded maritime intelligence company turning ocean data into real-time decisions. Its Larus VTOL fixed-wing hybrid drone launches straight off moving fishing vessels - no runway, no shore infrastructure - and its Fulcan AI vision stack reads the water below for fish, vessels and threats. Built first for commercial tuna fleets in Taiwan and the Philippines, Valtec's pitch is blunt: cut a month at sea down to two weeks, burn less fuel, and see what's happening in waters no one else is watching.
Ocean Aero Inc
Ocean Aero builds the Triton, the world's only autonomous vehicle that both sails on the surface and dives beneath it, powered entirely by sun and wind. Founded by U.S. Navy veterans in 2012 and now headquartered in Gulfport, Mississippi, the company makes long-endurance, crewless ocean robots used by the U.S. Navy and allied partners for surveillance, mine countermeasures, and ocean research, as well as by energy and science customers for seabed mapping and environmental monitoring.
Kevin Decker
Kevin Decker is the CEO of Ocean Aero, the Gulfport, Mississippi company that builds the TRITON - the world's only autonomous vehicle that both sails the surface on wind and solar power and dives beneath it. A 16-year GE veteran brought in at the end of 2020 to turn a Navy-veteran R&D shop into a commercial defense manufacturer, Decker moved the whole operation from San Diego to the Gulf Coast and opened a 63,000-square-foot factory. He is now steering Ocean Aero from handcrafted prototypes toward AI-driven fleets deployed by the U.S. Department of Defense, Homeland Security, NOAA, and offshore energy firms.
Apeiron Labs
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.
Ravi Pappu
Ravi Pappu is the founder and CEO of Apeiron Labs, a Cambridge, Massachusetts startup building low-cost autonomous robots that drift through the water column to measure the ocean at a scale never attempted. A physicist-turned-serial-founder, he invented Physical Unclonable Functions during his MIT PhD, co-founded the RFID pioneer ThingMagic (acquired by Trimble), and served as CTO of the CIA-linked venture firm In-Q-Tel before deciding the subsurface ocean was the hardest, most under-measured place on Earth and going after it with hardware he calls 'the CubeSat for the ocean.'