Bedrock’s Autonomous Ocean Mapping Ambitions Get $25 Million as Renewables Rise

Image credits: Bottom rock

Demand for offshore wind has skyrocketed, like all renewable energy sources, but the necessary work of surveying, inspecting and mapping coastal areas is a thing of the past. Bedrocks’ autonomous underwater vehicles and digital platform gaming could redefine the industry, and the company has attracted $25.5 million in new funding to attempt it.

Every wind turbine in the sea is actually a semi-submerged building, and buildings need a solid foundation and regular inspections even more than buildings above the water. Typically the type of seabed surveys that energy companies rely on (for oil and gas, as well as turbine placement) are done using powerful sonar units carried by relatively large vessels.

But this method has countless downsides: the cost and inefficiency of the vessels and crews themselves, the frequency and volume of sonar disturbing wildlife, the relatively limited detail provided, and the inflexibility of the legacy data these instruments often of the cold war era supply or feed into.

Robotic exploration has provided an alternative, but it brings its own problems, mainly of cost and scalability: making an autonomous underwater vehicle is one thing, but if it can’t meet commercial demand, it’s an experiment, not a product.

Bedrock sensed that it was time for a true AUV-as-a-service in 2020, and has since gone through several iterations of its (unfortunately unnamed) vessel and built an online platform, Mosaic, for the data which it acquires. . (We actually recorded a podcast with co-founder Anthony DiMare last year about this.)

The AUV itself was built out of necessity, as the off-the-shelf solutions were inadequate, and having assembled 2.8 of them, the production version is locked down and ready to be phased out on a massive scale. (Perhaps worth mentioning here, with the OceanGate tragedy fresh in the minds of many, that these are an entirely different class of vehicle, unmanned and not intended to go to such crushing depths as where the wreck of the Titanic.)

But while the company is proud of its vehicle, the sensors on board and the data they collect are infinitely more important. Because the vehicle skims just meters above the seabed rather than the surface, there are more and better tools at the crews’ disposal.

While a ship passing overhead might glean a good representation of the depth and shape of the surface below, many details are difficult or impossible to glean. Bedrocks AUV, however, has just the suite going:

• Bathymetry, the shape of the seabed
• Backscatter, the hardness of the seabed substrate (e.g. stone, sand or silt?)
• Side-scan sonar, used to detect the outlines of objects, a bit like lidar does
• Magnetic readings for detecting metal objects (such as wrecks, unexploded ordnance, or trash)
• Early, sub-bottom sonar profile featuring below the surface

There is also the significant advantage that this data could conceivably be collected and delivered within a day versus months or even years for traditional oceanographic surveys. At a time when projects like wind farms must move quickly or risk losing federal contracts or valuable land deals, this is an important consideration.

DiMare explained that these offshore wind developers are already paying big bucks for seabed mapping and reconnaissance, but they still have to wait not only for a slow and outdated data stack to deliver the information, but equally slow bureaucratic delays as well. obsolete in case of delays. No one wants to wait, but their options are limited, the faster they can get and confirm this data, the better for everyone involved. Then there is the implied value of seabed monitoring for scientists, military and defense organizations as well.

Bedrock co-founders Charles Chiau (center) and Anthony DiMare (right) and a crew member. Image credits: Bottom rock

He also said that Bedrock’s approach has evolved from one potentially project-based to a more self-powered data game. You might of course think that the business model would be that Company A says they come and scan this port and it costs us and Bedrock does that and accordingly bills them for essentially a faster, richer version of the service that the company already uses.

But this runs into problems as the company grows. First, you end up deep into logistics, shipping your AUV all over the place to bid on as many customers as possible. On the other hand, in this model the customer probably owns the resulting data valuable data collected by Bedrock!

On the other hand, if Bedrock were to identify valuable areas to survey on its own, it could do so in its own time and then sell that data to whoever wanted to pay for it by acting as a data provider, not an AUV provider. It’s a potentially less complex approach that also maintains control over the valuable intellectual property the company is creating.

And so, after two years of prototyping and refining the business, the company lined up investors for a $25.5 million A-round (following an $8 million seed in 2021). The round was co-led by Northzone and Primary Venture Partners, with participation from Valor Equity Partners, Eniac, Quiet Capital and R7. (Prolific individuals and angels are in there but not noted by name.)

Image credits: Bottom rock

DiMare said the money will enable the company to demonstrate commercial viability. He knows he can collect data, but can we turn that data set into money?

This allows us to make some bets and experiment with how we can accelerate the offshore wind industry, he told me. The bigger mission is to explore and map the entire ocean, but more immediately we need to build these wind farms. There’s more demand than we can serve and fill, so we need to be able to build a team of people and get operations across the East Coast.

Lest you think Bedrocks’ business will die out as its customers (many of whom exploit the Inflation Reduction Act) dry up, remember that these wind farms are long-term installations that require inspection and maintenance which in many ways it’s as old school as the tracking process. The data game might be good for regular income now, but as the company’s fleet grows, it will likely have its work cut out monitoring the rapidly growing forest of wind turbines it helped create.

Even if constructed offshore wind capacity doesn’t meet federal goals (and is more likely to exceed them), that’s still essentially a green (or blue) market for companies like Bedrock.

We are not entering a future where less critical infrastructure information is acceptable, DiMare said. If you want anything to happen, you’ll need to figure out what’s going on in the ocean. Is this a 10 or 20 billion dollar market? 20 would be better, sure, but 10 isn’t bad either.