Bedrock Scores $8M in Funding to Fast Track Ocean Data Initiatives
Bedrock Ocean Exploration, which was created to make the business of gathering, processing and disseminating accurate information on the world’s oceans to key stakeholders, has raised an $8M seed round from Eniac Ventures, Primary Venture Partners, Quiet Capital and R7.The funding is targeted to help Bedrock scale their robotics and cloud software to map the ocean floor more efficiently than ever, effectively removing people & ship-centric acquisition operations. Bedrock’s goal is to ultimately provide centralized access to the first complete map and database of our oceans at the highest possible resolution.“For more than three years, we explored ocean tech as a category of interest,” said Vic Singh, General Partner at Eniac Ventures. “We believe it is a deeply underinvested sector and ripe for opportunity given the vast amount of data.”Bedrock’s founders, Anthony DiMare, CEO and co-founder of Bedrock, and Charles Chiau, CTO, have almost three decades of experience at the intersection of maritime and technology. DiMare previously founded Nautilus Labs, a maritime technology company aiming to advance the efficiency of ocean commerce through artificial intelligence.Chiau was previously at SpaceX where he helped design the avionics systems for Crew Dragon. He also was a system engineer at Reliable Robotics working on their autonomous aviation system, and was the CTO of DeepFlight where he developed manned submersibles.While opportunities abound throughout the sector, at the outset Bedrock is aiming to support the explosion of offshore wind projects in the United States and abroad. Everything from site exploration to export and array cable laying and operations and maintenance (O&M) work rely on geophysical surveys. Bedrock is doing this more safely, quickly, and efficiently through a new breed of marine surveying enabled by their proprietary Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV)-based data acquisition platform and software ecosystem they’re building around the collected data.Image courtesy Bedrock Ocean Exploration