Apeiron Labs raises $9.5M to automate ocean data collection

Apeiron Labs, a marine technology startup founded in 2022, has closed a $9.5 million Series A funding round to scale the production of its autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs). The company builds these small, robotic submersibles to collect subsurface measurements and address the lack of detailed ocean data, aiming to fill critical data gaps.

The funding round was led by:

• Dyne Ventures
• RA Capital Management Planetary Health
• S2G Investments

Other participants in the round included:

• Assembly Ventures
• Bay Bridge Ventures
• TFX Capital

Traditional oceanographic data collection relies on expensive, ship-based expeditions. According to Ravi Pappu, founder and CEO of Apeiron Labs, gathering data from the subsurface ocean has historically been difficult and slow, requiring expeditions on ships that cost $100,000 a day. This high cost and slow pace make subsurface data collection a persistent challenge.

To bypass these costly expeditions, Apeiron Labs builds compact AUVs that measure three feet long, five inches in diameter, and weigh just over 20 pounds. These vehicles travel 400 meters up and down the water column—the vertical section of ocean from the surface to the seafloor. While diving, they sample temperature, salinity, and acoustics once or twice per day. To capture high-resolution data across a broad area, the AUVs are spaced 10 km to 20 km (6.2 miles to 12.4 miles) apart.

According to Pappu, Apeiron Labs has already brought the cost of ocean data down by 100-fold. He thinks the company can reduce the cost of ocean data by a factor of 1,000 next year. “We think of ourselves as the CubeSat for the ocean,” Pappu said, referencing a type of small, low-cost satellite.

Pappu founded the company after working at In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital arm, where the lack of ocean data was a persistent problem. The startup’s AUVs are designed to fit into the U.S. Navy’s existing launch equipment, and the company is targeting both civilian and defense customers, including the Pentagon, to address this data gap.

Why it matters

By applying the “CubeSat” model of small, low-cost hardware to oceanography, Apeiron Labs is attempting to solve a persistent data gap that currently relies on expensive, ship-based expeditions. If successful, this approach could significantly lower the financial barrier to monitoring subsurface ocean conditions for both commercial and defense applications.