Bedrock Emerges with US$8M Seed to Map the World’s Oceans

Bedrock, whose mission is to accelerate our understanding of the ocean, has raised a US$8M seed round from Eniac Ventures, Primary Venture Partners, Quiet Capital and R7. The new funding will help Bedrock to scale their robotics and cloud software to map the ocean floor in a way that aims to remove the inefficiencies of people & ship-centric acquisition operations. Their goal is to ultimately provide centralized access to the first complete map and database of our oceans at the highest possible resolution.

“For over three years, we explored ocean tech as a category of interest. We believe that it is a deeply underinvested sector and that it is ripe for opportunity, given the vast amount of data. When we met Anthony DiMare and Charles Chiau, we knew that we had found the right team. They bridge a necessary technology gap in a way that the industry desperately needs. We are excited to partner with Bedrock to build the category-defining company in ocean mapping and exploration – an enormous market, with few technology players,” said Vic Singh, general partner at Eniac Ventures.

The Need to Map the Ocean Floor

“More than 80% of the ocean has never been mapped, explored, or even seen by humans. It’s believed that less than 5% has been mapped at least at a 100m resolution. At that level of detail, you wouldn’t know that Manhattan was a city at all. A far greater percentage of the surfaces of the Moon and Mars have been mapped and studied than our own ocean floor has, and that needs to change very quickly,” said Anthony DiMare, CEO and co-founder of Bedrock.

Bedrock’s founders, Anthony DiMare and Charles Chiau, have almost three decades of experience at the intersection of maritime and technology.

DiMare previously founded Nautilus Labs, a leading maritime technology company advancing the efficiency of ocean commerce through artificial intelligence. While at Nautilus, he helped global companies solve challenges with distributed, siloed maritime data systems and built the early team that launched Nautilus Platform into large publicly listed shipping companies.

Solving the Key Barriers to Map the Seafloor

Charles Chiau, Bedrock’s CTO, was previously at SpaceX where he helped design the avionics systems for Crew Dragon. He also was a systems engineer at Reliable Robotics working on their autonomous aviation system, and was the CTO of DeepFlight where he developed manned submersibles including ones for Tom Perkins, Richard Branson and Steve Fossett. Anthony DiMare and Charles Chiau came together over their shared belief in the global need for an organized, technology-first effort to explore and map the ocean as a public benefit corporation. They realized that together they could solve the key barriers to accomplishing this: high costs of data acquisition driven by reliance on slow, ship-based surveys, and complex data processing and sharing challenges of current software systems.

Bedrock is receiving significant interest, collecting mission-critical seafloor data 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), relies 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 that they’re building around the collected data.

Over time, however, the goal is much larger. The ocean is the planet’s largest energy sink and plays a fundamental role in our climate, yet is not mapped to modern high-resolution standards. Bedrock believes that filling this massive knowledge gap will support a growing number of critical offshore-based industries and is central to solving Earth’s environmental crisis.

“This is a very exciting time for us to launch Bedrock and help humanity better understand our global ecosystem in order to ensure and maximize the long-term viability of life on Earth,” said Charles Chiau.

To learn more about Bedrock, see here.