Bedrock Ocean Exploration

A Big Picture Problem 🗺️

The Unknowns Of The Ocean

The Dilemma

• Current State: Despite covering 70% of Earth's surface and playing a crucial role in climate regulation, food security, and global commerce, humanity has mapped less than 30% of the ocean floor and explored only a fraction of marine ecosystems.

• Complications: Traditional ocean exploration methods are expensive, time-consuming, and can disturb or damage aquatic life. Furthermore, since ocean ecosystems are so vast and are constantly changing, it is exceptionally difficult to maintain up-to-date, comprehensive datasets of the entire ocean.

• Consequences: An incomplete understanding of ocean currents, temperature variations, and chemical compositions hampers society’s capacity to create accurate climate models and develop effective strategies to address climate change. It also makes it harder for governments and organizations to plan and manage offshore energy projects, waterways for cargo ships, restoration initiatives and other programs, because teams cannot adequately account for fluctuating ocean environments without more data.

Searching For A Solution 📡

Bedrock Ocean Exploration

The Basics

• Mission: To map and understand the world’s oceans.

• Summary: Bedrock Ocean is developing a fleet of autonomous underwater machines to traverse the ocean floor, map the landscape by using various sensors, and use this data to build a bathymetric representation of the ocean with far more precision and fidelity than traditional methods that rely on ships on the surface of the ocean and satellites in low Earth orbit.

• Year Founded: 2020.

The Framework

• Solution(s): Bedrock Ocean’s fleet of underwater vehicles are equipped with sonars, magnetometers and other special sensors to map ocean floor areas with > 20x more resolution than traditional methods. For reference, the company reported map resolutions as precise as 10 centimeters (4 inches) earlier this year, and most ocean data today is mapped with resolutions > 100 meters (~328 feet).

• Strategy: In addition to the fleet of underwater machines, Bedrock Ocean is building a software system to handle data processing and analytics. This will help prospective customers access data about newly mapped ocean floors in near real-time, and their software platform can evolve into a central data hub for analytics, machine learning, apps and more.

• Signal: Bedrock Ocean has already corralled a group of 10 major organizations to participate in its proof of technology program throughout the 2024 spring and summer. If results are promising, long-term strategic partners and customers may be formed from this pilot program.

The Team

• Founder(s):

  • Chief Executive Officer - Anthony DiMare. 

    • Previously:

      • Co-Founder @ Nautilus Labs.

  • Chief Technology Officer - Charles Chiau.

    • Previously:

      • Avionics Systems @ SpaceX.

      • Systems Engineer @ Reliable Robotics.

      • CTO @ DeepFlight.

• Headquarters: Brooklyn, New York, United States

• # Of Employees: 11 - 50

Click the button below to request an introduction to the founder

The Channels

• Socials: LinkedIn. Twitter. Instagram.

• Website: https://www.bedrockocean.com

• Resources: Watch this video to see Anthony explain some of the oceanic problems society is facing and why Bedrock Ocean is able to help governments and industries better than alternative options.

Risk Alerts ⚠️

The Threats

• Commercial Risk: It is possible Bedrock Ocean is overestimating the readiness of its key markets to absorb the amount of data it wants to provide. While the potential use cases are vast, many prospective customers in government and scientific sectors have legacy software and hardware infrastructure. These customers may hesitate to adopt Bedrock Ocean’s solutions because they are not prepared to utilize vast amounts of data in existing and future applications to generate a positive return on investment.

• Technical Risk: The immense pressure, corrosive saltwater, and unpredictable underwater currents can cause equipment failures that are difficult to avoid and expensive to replace. These harsh deep sea conditions make it difficult for systems to maintain reliable communication with underwater machines, which can lead to data loss during transmission or storage. Furthermore, since there will be countless terabytes of data to process, store and analyze, the team’s data management and security practices need to be designed for extreme scale.

• Comparable To:

  • Terradepth.

  • Ocean Infinity.

  • Nauticus Robotics.

Deal Tracker 🧮

The Cap Table

• Series: A.

• Raised: $33.5 million USD.

• Investors: Led by Primary Venture Partners and Northzone. Participation from Eniac Ventures, R7 Partners and others.

Market Insights 💡

The Landscape

• Recent News: While most of the world’s oceans has not been mapped, 2024 data shows the amount of ocean floor with adequate mapping has increased by 4x since 2017. Big tech companies like Microsoft and Google have partnerships and initiatives of their own to support bathymetric data efforts, and oceanographers are discovering hundreds of new species from deep sea expeditions in uncharted waters.

• Growth Rates: According to a report from Markets and Markets, the autonomous underwater vehicle market is valued at $2.0 billion USD in 2024, and is expected to grow by 15.9% over the next 5 years and reach $4.3 billion USD by 2029.

• Ecosystem Dynamics: The United Nations' Seabed 2030 project has a goal to map the entire ocean floor by 2030. The organization’s strategy to accomplish its goal is to embrace partnership opportunities with many nations and private entities, which create a substantial market appetite for high resolution ocean mapping technology. It also intensified competition, so Bedrock Ocean must continue to deliver results if it wants to extend and grow its business relationships.

Industry Trends 📊

The Indicators

• Catalysts: The global momentum to develop offshore wind, improve climate forecasts, and restore ocean habitats necessitated better underwater sensor technology and drove the paradigm shift for the ocean mapping industry to gather higher resolution bathymetric data. However, the concurrent wave of advancements in data management and machine learning are also a necessity for the industry to process and understand the ocean’s vast array of information in productive ways. Both trends are tailwinds for Bedrock Ocean to attract more customers and build better products at lower costs for the next several years.

• Challenges: Satellites, marine ships, underwater vehicles and other sources all collect data about the ocean in different data formats and structures. It is an immense undertaking for Bedrock Ocean and its customers to clean and format all this information in a standard way, and to build the requisite technology integrations to comprehensively consider all the available data to improve the world’s oceanic decision-making. Furthermore, since the ocean is a global resource, the ocean mapping industry is dependent on international policy and cooperation to grow, evolve and reach its full potential.

• Recommended Reading: Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage by W. David Woods is a gripping account of an early 20th-century exploration to Antarctica. While this is not directly about ocean mapping, it does an excellent job at describing the relentless difficulties to navigate the ocean — something society can still appreciate a century later.

A Toolkit To Go 🛠️

The Equipment

• 🪨 Databricks - A platform for organizations to build, deploy, share, and maintain their data and AI solutions at scale.

• 🌎 Google Earth - A computer program to render a 3D representation of the world based primarily on satellite images.

• 🗞️ The Aurorean Newsletter - Our team’s weekly roundup of STEM’s most significant stories of progress. We scour 100+ sources so you don’t have to.

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Share Your Thoughts 💬

The Community Wisdom

The results are in from our poll last week. SirenOpt is a company on a mission to provide intelligence about nanoscale materials in manufacturing production lines and was over our horizon. The following is a snapshot of the sentiments our audience felt about them.

• Bulls 53%

  • Subscriber Perspective: 'If they legitimately have pilot programs with multiple NASDAQ 100 companies, then those results speak for themselves. These are the hardest customers to win business from, and they are in an enviable position to grow their customer base while gaining invaluable experience for future success.’

• Bears 47%

  • Subscriber Perspective: ‘I struggle to see why or how SirenOpt’s competitors are not able to replicate a similar solution to prevent their customers from switching to them. Maybe they were caught flatfooted, but I imagine the industry has high switching costs and the long sales cycles will give the market enough time to catch up and discourage new entrants from disrupting operational workflows.’