The Silicon Valley of smart ocean technologies

Underwater acoustic technology has been part of the hydrospatial industry’s toolbox for many decades, but as we witness throughout our industry, the combination of increasingly capable computing power and multiple data streams from new as well as old sources is creating new survey capabilities and products. One company exploiting this nexus in the field of passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) is the Portuguese startup blueOASIS. While building a contribution to the European Digital Twin of the Ocean, it aims to make the Azores archipelago the centre of underwater acoustics research and innovation.

After working in the Netherlands for 18 years, the R&D computational fluid dynamics coordinator of MARIN, Dr Guilherme Vaz, decided to return to his native Portugal in 2019. Initially he joined WavEC, a non-profit marine renewables research institute, but noticing a big gap between industry and academia with no private sector companies providing R&D services to the naval, maritime and offshore energy industries, he decided to found Blue Ocean Sustainable Solutions, better known as blueOASIS. Established in October 2021 in Ericeira, 35 kilometres northwest of Lisbon, blueOASIS made good use of the local Ericeira Business Factory incubator programme, graduating in February 2022 with four employees.

Right from the start, blueOASIS has taken an Industry 4.0 approach, bringing together expertise and experience in high-performance computing (HPC), machine learning & artificial intelligence, and big data & cloud computing. Equally, blueOASIS has also focused on ocean sustainability from its inception, working on solutions for renewable energy, sustainable aquaculture, decarbonization of the maritime sector and biodiversity monitoring, to name but a few.

blueOASIS has strong ties to the Azores and intends to consolidate the Azores islands as a hub for ocean technologies, attracting investment and developing local capabilities. To this end, the company plans to expand operations and invest in strategic partnerships with regional institutions. It has an office and workshop on the island of Faial and uses the surrounding ocean to develop, test and validate its products. At the start of 2025, the core blueOASIS team has grown to over 20 people, augmented by PhD candidates, external collaborators and a specialized team of about a dozen experts in labelling underwater acoustic data.

Pioneering spirit

In its relatively short existence, the expertise of the blueOASIS team in the field of hydrodynamics has already earned the company the reputation of a reliable partner in the maritime industry. Using a range of medium- to high-fidelity numerical tools such as computational fluid dynamics, the team has worked on projects such as the underwater exhaust scoop geometry analysis for a yacht, the estimation of the shallow-water total resistance of an electric ferry vessel, and the assessment of the thruster efficiency degradation due to thruster-hull interaction for clients such as DAMEN and the Jan De Nul Group.

The same expertise also established blueOASIS as a trusted supplier to Portugal’s renewables sector. Portugal is a pioneer in the development of floating wind technology. The Windfloat 1 project installed the world’s first floating 2MW wind turbine off Póvoa do Varzim in 2011, powering the current Windfloat Atlantic with three 8.4MW platforms installed off Viana do Castelo. The main advantage of floating wind energy is that it can be installed in deep waters, where more intense and consistent winds are found. For a country like Portugal, whose exclusive economic zone is mainly in deep water and about 19 times larger than its land area, floating wind technology has enormous socio-economic potential.

The blueOASIS team has worked on a wide range of floating wind and other renewables projects, such as the design and optimization of floating structures and mooring systems and the assessment of wave and tidal resource potential. It is part of the ongoing HORIZON Europe-funded FLOATFARM project, led by TU Berlin, which aims to significantly advance the maturity and competitiveness of floating offshore wind technology.

This all makes for a thriving R&D services company with happy customers, and that is where this blueOASIS story could finish, if it was not for Guilherme’s ambition to also develop new products and spin these out as ‘new’ startups.

Digital twin

With a deep understanding of PAM, underwater acoustics and machine learning and hands-on experience with the analysis and modelling that HPC can support so well, Guilherme identified a market opportunity for a digital twin based on underwater acoustics data.

Digital twin is a popular term these days and mostly used for digital models that lack the essential element of being continuously fed with observation data. Many models bearing the title ‘digital twin’ may have come about by means of machine learning using observation data, but unless a digital twin continues to be fed with observation data, which allows it to evolve and remain the ‘digital doppelgänger’ of the real-world system it is supposed to mimic, it is nothing more than a sophisticated snapshot in time.

With Hydrotwin, blueOASIS has created a proper digital twin. Using the Spotter platform from San Francisco-based Sofar Ocean as a starting point, blueOASIS added edge computing and AI capabilities to create the SCOUT-S PAM system. Particularly innovative is the edge computing capability, which allows for the in situ preprocessing of sensor data, improving processing efficiency and reducing data communication requirements. Where an uninterrupted data flow is essential, the SCOUT-C system connects directly to land-based facilities or seaborne vessels by cable. The data generated by multiple SCOUTs feeds into Hydrotwin’s cloud-based platform, where it can be combined with other relevant data streams, depending on the application. For example, PAM data combined with data on environmental parameters such as water temperature and salinity, and blueOASIS’s own sophisticated HPC-driven noise propagation models (RAINDROP), can be used to identify and locate different sources of engine noise. When compared with automatic identification system (AIS) location data and AIS vessel registration data regarding the vessel’s size and propulsion type, vessels that should but do not have their AIS on can be identified. However, a similar combination of PAM, environmental and AIS data could also allow the creation of a digital twin of the seabed topography.

The Hydrotwin platform has also been trained to identify and locate several aquatic species (cetaceans). Through its work in the marine renewables sector, blueOASIS understands the impact that regulation pertaining to marine ecosystems has, as well as the market opportunities that this creates for its PAM systems and Hydrotwin technology. It is part of the HORIZON Europe-funded PHAROS project, led by the Canary Islands Ocean Platform (PLOCAN), which supports the European Union’s ‘Restore our Oceans and Waters’ mission, one of the EU’s five missions to bring concrete solutions to some of our greatest challenges. PHAROS is also linked to the European Digital Twin of the Ocean (DTO). In PHAROS, blueOASIS leads the development of two local digital twins, one for Gran Canaria and one for Iceland, and the integration of these with the European DTO.

Hydrotwin was spun out as a stand-alone entity in May 2023 and has received investments from venture capital firm Portugal Ventures, the Singapore-based family office and private investment firm August One, and US investment firm Dexterity Financial.

Future aspirations

Looking ahead, blueOASIS in cooperation with the local authorities intends to create the first North Atlantic Underwater Acoustics Centre in the Azores by 2026. The archipelago’s strategic location in the North Atlantic, its unique ecological system and environmental conditions, the collaborative research network that includes institutions such as the Okeanos Institute of Marine Sciences of the University of the Azores and the Escola do Mar (School of the Sea), as well as the supportive business environment, make it an ideal location. Moreover, the decision of the Azores government in October 2024 to establish the Azores Marine Protected Area Network (RAMPA), the largest Marine Protected Area network in Europe, creates the conditions in which such an Underwater Acoustics Centre will thrive. With this centre, blueOASIS intends to make Faial island the Silicon Valley of smart ocean technologies.