Apeiron Labs Gets $9.5M to Flood the Oceans With Autonomous Underwater Robots

Despite decades of research, much of what humanity knows about the ocean barely extends beyond the surface. Satellites have generated vast amounts of marine data, but almost all of it is limited to the top layer of water. What lies beneath remains far less understood.

Tools such as buoys, research vessels, and a limited number of autonomous rovers have begun to add detail below the surface. However, the resulting picture still falls far short of the comprehensive visibility provided by satellites. This lack of subsurface data frustrates a wide range of stakeholders, from fishermen and offshore wind developers to meteorologists and the Coast Guard.

“Getting data from the subsurface ocean has always been really hard,” said Ravi Pappu, founder and CEO of Apeiron Labs, in an interview. “It’s prolonged. You need a ship that costs $100,000 a day, [and] steams out slowly. Everything’s an expedition.”

Pappu believes his company’s autonomous underwater vehicles could help change that reality. He founded Apeiron Labs in 2022 after serving as chief technology officer at In-Q-Tel, where he repeatedly encountered what he described as a persistent lack of usable ocean data.

To address those gaps, Apeiron Labs is developing low-cost autonomous underwater vehicles that repeatedly travel up and down the water column—the vertical span of the ocean from the surface to the seafloor—reaching depths of up to 400 meters. The vehicles collect measurements on temperature, salinity, and acoustics once or twice per day. According to Pappu, Apeiron already sells its technology to both civilian and defence customers.

To expand production and deployment of its vehicles, Apeiron Labs has raised $9.5 million in Series A funding, the company told TechAmerica.ai exclusively. The round was led by Dyne Ventures, RA Capital Management, Planetary Health, and S2G Investments, with participation from Assembly Ventures, Bay Bridge Ventures, and TFX Capital.

Apeiron’s vehicles are compact — about three feet long, five inches in diameter, and weighing just over 20 pounds. They can be launched from boats or dropped from aircraft and are designed to fit within existing U.S. Navy launch systems. Once deployed, an AUV orients itself, connects to a cloud-based operating system, and begins logging data.

As each vehicle dives, the operating system uses ocean models to predict where it will resurface. When the AUV eventually breaches the surface and reconnects, the newly collected data is fed back into the system, improving future predictions. The vehicles are typically spaced 10 to 20 kilometres apart, forming linear or array-based networks that capture subsurface data at much higher resolution than traditional ship-based surveys.

Apeiron envisions deploying dozens — or even hundreds — of these vehicles for different use cases. Defence agencies could use them to monitor for submarine activity near U.S. coastlines. At the same time, fisheries could rely on the data better to understand temperature and salinity conditions in key fishing areas. The broader objective, Pappu said, is persistent, continuous monitoring of critical ocean regions.

At its current scale, Pappu said Apeiron has already reduced the cost of collecting ocean data by a factor of 100. He believes the company can achieve a 1,000-fold cost reduction as early as next year.

Referencing a class of small, inexpensive satellites, Pappu summed up the company’s ambition: “We think of ourselves as the CubeSat for the ocean.”

Update 10 a.m. ET: The headline has been corrected to reflect that Apeiron Labs raised $9.5 million, not $29 million