Why We Invested in Bedrock Ocean: The Future of Ocean Intelligence

One of the next decade’s most important infrastructure markets isn’t in the cloud or on land, but on the ocean floor.

Today, we’re excited to share that Bedrock Ocean has raised $25 million to accelerate its mission of mapping Earth’s final frontier: the ocean floor. We have been investors with Bedrock since co-leading their seed round, and are proud to participate again alongside a stellar group of new partners led by co-leads Costanoa Ventures, Harmony Partners, and Katapult, alongside Autopilot and Mana Ventures plus other longtime believers like our friends and existing co-investors at Northzone, R7, Eniac, and Quiet Capital.

This funding comes on the heels of a breakout year for Bedrock, with commercial traction across multiple market sectors in the U.S. and field deployments that customers describe as “the best data we’ve ever seen”—often in conditions where traditional survey vessels would refuse to operate.

A new foundation beneath the sea

Bedrock is building the most comprehensive, scalable, and environmentally responsible ocean floor dataset ever assembled. Its vertically integrated approach combines custom-built autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) with a cloud-native data platform called Mosaic™, enabling survey turnaround in a matter of weeks instead of a year.

To understand how transformative this is, it helps to look at the status quo. Traditional subsea surveys require hundred-million dollar ships, cost approximately $100,000 per day to operate, and carry five-year-plus backlogs. They burn tens of tons of CO₂ daily and blast sonar from the surface, causing ecological damage. Bedrock, by contrast, can deploy battery-powered AUVs in hours, complete surveys in days, and upload data directly to the cloud—at a fraction of the cost and with minimal environmental impact.

In short: it makes deep sea data fast, cheap, and green. And like anytime something gets faster and cheaper, that is poised to open up massive new market opportunities on the ocean floor.

Why now? The infrastructure moment has arrived

The subsea opportunity is no longer theoretical. It’s an $8 billion market just in survey spend—and that’s before factoring in new categories like subsea data centers, carbon capture, and national security.

NATO is forming task forces around subsea infrastructure security. There are also use cases around energy, telecom, environmental monitoring, deep sea mining, defense, and more.

As one example, the U.S. has over 450 gigawatts of offshore wind in its pipeline through 2050. Offshore wind projects alone require 20+ surveys per development cycle, across bidding, planning, construction, and operations. Several of the largest wind developers in the world are already engaging Bedrock for next-generation, marine-mammal-safe survey capabilities.

A team with the right pedigree and persistence

We first met founder/CEO Charlie Chiau in 2020. What stood out was not just his technical depth—Charlie started building subsea tech nearly 20 years ago at DeepFlight and then worked at SpaceX—but his obsession with building for scale.

Bedrock’s team of thirty-five includes top talent from Google, SpaceX, NASA, Cruise, and L3Harris, and it has already achieved in four years what most defense contractors need decades (and hundreds of millions of dollars) to do:

• A full-stack AUV fleet, now in Gen 2
• A cloud platform that makes ocean data accessible and interoperable
• Hardware built in-house in four to six weeks
• Compliance with IHO’s most stringent global accuracy standards

Even prior to this round, the team had already reached unit economics that would turn any hardware CFO’s head. Now, with additional capital, Bedrock will:

• Expand data acquisition across U.S. and global coastlines
• Scale manufacturing capacity to meet surging survey demand
• Advance full autonomy in the field—from deployment to delivery
• Enable over-the-horizon fleet operations with minimal human input

Data is the real wedge

Perhaps most exciting is Bedrock’s multi-client data model. Unlike legacy survey firms that deliver hard drives once and move on, Bedrock can make the same dataset available to multiple buyers—turning each mission into a flywheel of recurring revenue. It’s not just a better way to survey; it’s a fundamentally better business.

Mosaic is poised to become the foundational ocean intelligence platform for developers, governments, researchers, and regulators alike. The ability to license high-resolution ocean floor data—collected sustainably, processed in real time, and accessed in the cloud—will unlock use cases we can’t yet predict, just as satellite imagery did on land.

Where we go from here

What started as a next-generation survey company is now becoming a data infrastructure platform for the ocean. That’s why we invested.

We believe the Bedrock team is building a new category at the intersection of robotics, data, climate, and infrastructure—one that will underpin critical decisions across energy, defense, and the environment for decades to come.

We’re proud to back Charlie, Brandon, and the entire Bedrock team as it builds a living digital twin of the ocean—an enduring foundation of intelligence, resilience, and prosperity for generations to come.