Despite oceans covering more than seventy percent of our planet’s surface, humanity has clearer maps of the lunar terrain than our own ocean floors. This disparity arises from the immense challenges posed by the ocean’s extreme conditions, where traditional methods of mapping—typically involving large, crewed ships emitting powerful sonar pulses—are both costly and disruptive to marine ecology. Now, with the advancement of robotics technology, we stand poised to change that.
Leading the latest push in autonomous seabed exploration is Bedrock Ocean, a startup that has successfully raised $25 million in a recent Series A-2 funding round. Primary and Northzone co-led the financing, alongside contributions from Autopilot, Costanoa Ventures, Harmony Partners, Katapult, and Mana Ventures.
To tackle the complexities of marine mapping, Bedrock has designed a fleet of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs). Powered by lithium-ion batteries, these vehicles can operate independently underwater for up to twelve hours. Equipped with sonar arrays and magnetic sensors, Bedrock’s AUVs detect and record detailed imagery of ocean floor contours, providing valuable data without the high environmental impact typical of current ship-based methods.
Traditional ocean mapping ships are energy-intensive, requiring significant fuel for operations and onboard crews to guide them. Their high-powered sonar can be disruptive to marine mammals and fish. By contrast, Bedrock’s advanced robotic approach is quieter, more energy-efficient, and allows a single, small support vessel to deploy multiple autonomous systems simultaneously. According to Bedrock CEO and co-founder Brandon Mah, a single modest-sized vessel can manage a dozen AUVs, offering efficiencies and cost-savings not previously achievable with conventional mapping techniques.
Bedrock Ocean designs and manufactures their underwater vehicles in-house, at less than one million dollars apiece. Alongside this, the team has also developed proprietary software to control the vehicles autonomously and swiftly process data collected underwater. Data is initially stored and partially processed onboard each AUV. When ready to transmit, the vehicles emerge and connect via Wi-Fi to their surface control vessel, which in turn uploads data to cloud servers using satellite communications such as Starlink. This approach allows researchers and clients to receive detailed mapping data in near real-time—significantly faster than conventional methods.
Bedrock’s vehicles navigate at depths ranging from five to ten meters above the seabed, enabling detailed scans with lower-power sonar that emits frequencies beyond the hearing sensitivity of marine mammals. This proximity to the seafloor and reduced power requirements greatly reduce the likelihood of harming marine life.
The accuracy of data collected by Bedrock’s vehicles—the ability to pinpoint objects or geological features—is within one to two meters. While this resolution is slightly less refined compared to ship-based GPS-calibrated surveys, it is more than sufficient for many applications, according to Mah. Because GPS is unavailable underwater, Bedrock’s AUVs instead rely on inertial navigation systems, resulting in marginally less precision, yet sufficient accuracy for many commercial and scientific tasks. Particularly for industries like offshore wind energy, rapid and cost-effective mapping is proving highly advantageous, especially for preliminary planning and development stages.
Over the past six months, Bedrock Ocean has already secured paid projects with offshore wind operators, energy companies, and organizations conducting environmental impact assessments. The startup’s rapid deployment capabilities and its innovative method of rapidly producing actionable data have notably drawn interest from the U.S. Navy, impressing officials with the speed and quality of the company’s technological capabilities.
