To the Depths and Beyond: Why We Led Bedrock’s Seed
Today, our company Bedrock Ocean Exploration came out of stealth mode. We are thrilled to unveil Bedrock to the world having led their seed round with our friends at Primary, Quiet and R7 back in 2020.
We started investigating the ocean tech sector broadly over 3 years ago and made our first investment in the space with a transport bet in Sea Machines building autonomous sea vessels. We continued to track the space having met with many companies building systems for aquaculture, autonomy and climate modeling. We quickly realized how underinvested the sector is and concluded that mapping the world’s oceans was too important and lucrative for us to take a back seat. Unlike the spacetech category which has seens heaps of investment and innovation with cube satellite constellations and geospatial software, ocean data is largely untapped. We believe there exists a massive opportunity to map the world’s oceans and leverage that data to advance commercial efforts and move humanity to a cleaner future.
Bedrock is working to make high-quality, high-resolution subsea data more accessible. To do this they are building a fleet of autonomous, software centric robots. They plan to combine their own survey data with third party data to create a comprehensive catalog of reusable subsea data which corporations, governments, and scientific institutions can access via a cloud platform. In doing so, they will essentially replace expensive and inefficient subsea surveys with a data-as-a-service platform for a fraction of the cost. Long term, they hope to open up the data they collect to new applications in order to provide deeper insights, including within weather forecasting, climate science, resource management, and navigation.
The subsea survey market is huge (~50BB TAM) with millions of dollars spent daily by oil and gas, telecoms, offshore wind and other players trying to get the best data to invest in their own ocean based infrastructure. Bedrock’s full stack approach to building the data capture layer through autonomy, combined with their ability to replace expensive one off projects with a data-as-a-service model, makes them well poised to disrupt this market.
When we met Anthony and Charlie, we knew we found the right team with the right vision and product strategy to tackle this massive problem and unlock a huge opportunity to democratize data from the world’s oceans. Anthony and Charlie have almost three decades of combined experience at the intersection of maritime and technology. Anthony previously founded Nautilus Labs, a leading maritime technology company advancing the efficiency of ocean commerce through artificial intelligence. Charlie was previously at SpaceX, Reliable Robotics and DeepFlight where he developed manned submersibles. We couldn’t be more excited to partner with this incredible team to help them realize their vision.
Stealing from Anthony, Bedrock’s CEO — “To the depths and beyond!”
