The ocean has a SpaceX problem

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We have robots on Mars, autonomous vehicles in our skies, and GPU clusters in orbit. The technology operating in our oceans, covering 70% of the planet, looks largely like it did in the 1990s. Two Irish-founded companies are working to change that.

Three weeks ago, we wrote about capital following geopolitical power, from DARPA’s role in seeding Silicon Valley to European defence budgets repricing an entire venture category. This edition is about a quieter version of the same dynamic, an ocean economy worth $2 trillion, running on 1990s technology, sitting at the intersection of climate urgency, critical infrastructure vulnerability, and accelerating private capital. And, once again, Ireland turns out to be unexpectedly central to the story.

Before we get to the investment case, a quick visit to County Louth. 

James Ives is an engineer and avid sailor who spent his career in marine energy. As CEO of OpenHydro, he built one of the world’s leading tidal stream turbine companies before it was acquired in 2013 by Naval Energies for $173m. He left with a clear view of both the scale of the ocean economy and the fundamental inefficiency at its heart, gathering ocean data, the foundation of every offshore energy project and subsea survey, still required crewed vessels burning thousands of litres of fuel per day. 

In 2017, Ives founded XOCEAN in Rathcor, County Louth. Its uncrewed surface vessels, roughly the size of a car, are remotely operated via satellite by analysts onshore. They emit one-thousandth of the carbon of a conventional survey ship, operate continuously for up to a month without returning to port, and cost a fraction of a crewed alternative. XOCEAN now operates the world’s largest fleet of survey-class USVs, with a 31st vessel in build. Its clients include Ørsted, BP, Shell and SSE Renewables. The company has supported over 43 gigawatts of new offshore wind capacity across 23 territories.

In June 2024 XOCEAN raised €30m in an oversubscribed Series B led by VentureWave, including €20m in venture debt from the European Investment Bank. Six months later it raised €115m backed by S2G Ventures, Climate Investment, Morgan Stanley’s 1GT fund. The IVCA named it the defining deal of the Irish market in Q4 2024.

On the other side of the country, a few years behind in the journey, Will O’Brien from County Cork co-founded Ulysses in 2023 with his brother Colm, a Trinity College Dublin mechanical engineering graduate. Will was also an early GTM employee in Irish E-Comm lender, Wayflyer. Now based in San Francisco, Ulysses builds autonomous underwater vehicles for ocean stewardship. Its Mako AUV and Leviathan surface vessel operate as a unified system, Leviathan commands the Mako fleet, which maps the seafloor and plants seagrass seeds at one-tenth the cost of hand-planting. In November 2024, the company raised $2m in an oversubscribed pre-seed led by Lowercarbon Capital, with Intercom co-founders Eoghan McCabe and Ciarán Lee among the angels. It has since closed $1m in early revenue, completed the largest seagrass restoration trials in Western Australia, and is expanding into offshore wind survey and maritime surveillance. 

Why the technology gap is closing now

The ocean is the most under-explored domain on Earth. We have mapped less of the seafloor than we have of the surface of Mars. Most survey work still relies on crewed diesel vessels, constrained by weather and human endurance. The result is that ocean data is expensive, infrequent and carbon-intensive, meaning the industries depending on it make consequential decisions with incomplete information.

The reason this is changing is the same reason aerial drones became ubiquitous. Battery costs fell, driven by EVs. Sensor costs collapsed, driven by smartphones. Satellite communication became cheap enough for persistent remote operations. XOCEAN’s USVs consume roughly 20 litres of diesel per day compared to thousands for a conventional vessel. Ulysses built the Mako using EV battery components, FPV drone navigation hardware, and an autonomy stack that would have cost orders of magnitude more a decade ago. The ocean is receiving the same hardware cost curve that transformed aerial robotics, arriving about a decade later. The AUV market stood at $2.9bn in 2025 and is projected to reach $6.6bn by 2030 at a compound annual growth rate of 18%.

What is happening across the sector

Capital formation in ocean autonomy is now accelerating across multiple sub-categories simultaneously. Saildrone raised $100m in a Series C in 2025 for its fleet of autonomous ocean data and defence surveillance vessels. Saronic Technologies, building autonomous surface vessels for the US Navy, raised $600m in February 2025 at a $4bn valuation and followed it with a $392m Navy production contract. Saronic was founded in 2022 and reached unicorn status within 18 months. Helsing, which we have mentioned before in this newsletter, acquired subsea specialist Blue Ocean in October to fold AUV manufacturing into its AI defence stack.

The dual-use dynamic is structurally significant and connects directly to the defence spending trends we covered in our geopolitics edition. The same vessel that surveys an offshore wind site can monitor subsea cable routes for interference. The same AUV that plants seagrass can carry acoustic sensors for port security. Ukraine’s use of autonomous drone vessels to constrain the Russian Black Sea Fleet without a conventional navy has reshuffled the procurement priorities of defence ministries across Europe and the US. Ocean autonomy startups now face simultaneous government interest from energy regulators, environmental agencies, and defence departments. This is why the capital is diverse.

Why Ireland is not a bystander

Three-quarters of all cables in the northern hemisphere pass through or near Irish waters, most off the south and west coasts. These cables carry the internet traffic and financial transactions the global economy depends on. Ireland has almost no capacity to monitor or protect them. The Irish Naval Service has operated with as few as two active ships in recent years. Ireland is not a NATO member, reducing the diplomatic risk of hostile operations in its exclusive economic zone. Russian commercial vessels have been observed loitering near cable routes in Irish waters. The CSIS described Ireland as in a “particularly vulnerable position.” Ireland joined the EU’s PESCO Critical Seabed Infrastructure Protection project in 2024 and is developing its first national maritime security strategy.

The asymmetry is structural and tractable. Monitoring 320km of an exclusive economic zone with crewed naval vessels requires a fleet Ireland cannot quickly build. Monitoring it with persistent autonomous systems is a solvable problem at current hardware costs. XOCEAN’s platform, already proven across 23 territories, is operationally identical to what maritime security applications require. The same technical foundation underpins civil hydrography, cable route survey, carbon capture site assessment, and defence contracts. That is the XOCEAN opportunity in one sentence: one platform, multiple structurally supported revenue streams.

How private capital is approaching this

Ocean technology attracted almost no venture capital for most of its history. The first meaningful Irish VC money arrived via VentureWave’s impact vehicle, which backed XOCEAN on the thesis that ocean data was foundational to the offshore energy transition. That was a differentiated call. The validation that followed, including the EIB’s €20m venture debt and then Morgan Stanley’s growth equity, is a pattern now visible across the category.

The investor base that has formed around ocean autonomy in the past three years spans climate funds, infrastructure investors, and pure defence equity. The same underlying technology is attracting capital from four different capital stacks simultaneously. That convergence is unusual and significant, suggesting ocean autonomy is not a single-thesis bet but a platform capable of generating returns across multiple investor mandates.

Subsurface vehicles for deep ocean monitoring, acoustic communication infrastructure between autonomous fleets, and the data products built on top of persistent ocean sensor networks are all areas where institutional capital has not formed a consensus view. In prior frontier technology cycles, that consensus arrives quickly once a benchmark is set. Saronic’s trajectory has set one on the defence side. XOCEAN’s growth from a Louth engineering team to a Morgan Stanley portfolio company is setting another on the commercial side. The private market window, where early positions can be established before public benchmarks exist, is the one currently open.

The bottom line

The autonomous transformation of the ocean is arriving later than it did in air or space, but the structural forces behind it are identical. Hardware costs have fallen, government procurement is following, and private capital is beginning to price in what that means. Ireland's position in this is not incidental. Three-quarters of northern hemisphere internet traffic crosses Irish waters. The country's universities have produced engineers who understand the sea, and increasingly, the investors willing to back them are here too. The pieces are in place.

What we’ve been working on at Shuttle

• In the final stages of prepping for our funding round 💰

• Shipped some bug fixes and stability improvements to our cap table management product 🛠️

• Reviewing investment opportunities with founders and VCs 🤝

The Unsophisticated Investor is brought to you by Scott & Rob, the founders of Shuttle. We’re both sick of private markets being a playground exclusive to the ultra-wealthy so we started a company to challenge the status-quo. Shuttle’s singular focus is to unlock private markets for Millennial and Gen Z tech professionals and help them build wealth through the highest performing private market opportunities.

Scott & Rob
Shuttle Co-Founders