Apeiron Labs, a US-based ocean technology startup, has raised $9.5 million in Series A funding to expand the deployment of its autonomous underwater robots designed to collect subsurface ocean data at scale.
The round was led by Dyne Ventures, RA Capital Management Planetary Health, and S2G Investments, with participation from Assembly Ventures, Bay Bridge Ventures, and TFX Capital.
The company is tackling one of the biggest blind spots in climate, security, and maritime operations: the lack of continuous, high-resolution data below the ocean surface.
A new approach to subsurface ocean monitoring
While satellites provide extensive coverage of surface-level ocean data, insights below the top layer remain sparse and expensive to obtain. Traditional methods rely on ships, buoys, and limited autonomous systems, often requiring costly expeditions and slow deployment cycles.
Apeiron Labs is addressing this gap with compact, low-cost autonomous underwater vehicles that repeatedly move up and down the water column, collecting data on temperature, salinity, and acoustics. Each vehicle can operate continuously, sampling the ocean once or twice per day without human intervention.
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From intelligence gaps to scalable infrastructure
The company was founded in 2022 by Ravi Pappu, former CTO of In-Q-Tel, after repeatedly encountering the lack of subsurface ocean data as a limiting factor across defense, environmental, and commercial use cases.
Apeiron’s vehicles are designed to be easily deployable from boats or aircraft and are compatible with existing naval launch systems. Once in the water, they connect to a cloud-based operating system that predicts surfacing locations, ingests new measurements, and continuously refines ocean models.
Deployed in arrays spaced roughly 10 to 20 kilometres apart, the vehicles generate higher-resolution data than traditional ship-based surveys, enabling persistent monitoring over large areas.
Civilian and defense applications
Apeiron Labs already serves both civilian and defense customers. Potential use cases range from monitoring submarine activity and maritime security to improving weather forecasting, fisheries management, offshore energy planning, and climate research.
By replacing expedition-based data collection with autonomous systems, the company says it has already reduced the cost of subsurface ocean data by a factor of 100. Its next goal is a 1,000-fold reduction, which it believes is achievable within the next year.
Building the CubeSat equivalent for the ocean
With the new funding, Apeiron Labs plans to manufacture and deploy dozens, and eventually hundreds, of its underwater robots across strategically important regions of the ocean.
The company positions its technology as an ocean analogue to low-cost satellite constellations, enabling continuous, distributed sensing at a fraction of traditional costs.
By turning the deep ocean into a persistently monitored environment, Apeiron Labs aims to make subsurface data as accessible and actionable as satellite data is today.
