US AUV Developer Marks First Step Towards Tech’s Commercialisation, Aims to Accelerate Seafloor Data Acquisition for Offshore Wind

July 12, 2023, by Adrijana Buljan

Bedrock, the US-based developer of a portable autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) for offshore wind surveys, has secured USD 25.5 million in a Series A funding round, bringing its total funding to date to USD 33.5 million and the technology a step closer to commercial use.

The company says it will use the funds to bring its data offering to the offshore wind market this year, as well as to continue to expand its AUV fleet and begin expanding its ability to conduct ocean deployments.

The investment round was co-led by global venture capital firm Northzone and Primary Venture Partners, with significant participation from Valor Equity Partners, and existing investors Eniac, Quiet Capital, and R7. Bedrock noted that it also continues to garner support from individual investors in the space and prolific angels.

The company introduced its technology last year saying the AUV is extremely easy to transfer and deploy, and that it has advantages in terms of marine mammal protection and weather windows compared to conventional solutions. In an interview with offshoreWIND.biz in June 2022, Bedrock’s co-founder and CEO Anthony DiMare especially highlighted access to cloud-based geophysical data.

Could a 30-Kilogram Portable AUV Replace Geophysical Survey Vessels in Offshore Wind?

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Announcing the close of its Series A funding round, the company said it was committed to transforming how geophysical seafloor data is acquired and distributed, with an aim for its AUV technology and cloud data platform to reduce the time, environmental impact, and costs associated with seafloor exploration and mapping, speeding up the development of offshore wind energy.

Together with bringing its AUV to full commercialisation, Bedrock also plans to build the largest library of seafloor data that can be licensed to many at a dramatically reduced cost to surveys today, according to the company.

“Bedrock’s mission is to accelerate ocean exploration by developing the technology needed to build the most accessible and complete ocean dataset. Our goal is to provide accelerated innovations at sea to rapidly advance the collective understanding of oceans, remove bottlenecks in critical infrastructure projects, and provide valuable data insights necessary for stakeholders to make lower-risk, and impactful decisions”, says Anthony DiMare, Co-Founder and CEO.

“The ocean, being one of the few true planetary-scale entities, has a profound influence on our climate’s agenda and is one of Earth’s largest environmental data gaps. To effectively understand and protect it, we need a system that scales and democratizes access to ocean data and that’s exactly what we’re bringing to the offshore wind market with Bedrock”.