Nauticus Robotics – a leading developer of subsea robots and software – announced it raised over $12 million in funding. This was part of a second tranche of investment.
The new funding round will expedite the certification of Nauticus’ flagship robot, the Aquanaut – which facilitates the transformation of tethered ROV operations to fully autonomous operations. And it is expected to perform numerous tasks in water depths ranging from 200 – 2000+ meters during February in preparation for an inaugural job inspecting a deep-water production facility of a major oil and gas company in the Gulf of Mexico. The new funding round comes only weeks after the company announced a change in leadership, including a new CEO, CFO and lead General Counsel.
The company’s software architecture is platform independent and can be used on all subsurface vehicles and has already been deployed on several competitor vehicles for defense-related work. And this enables the company to become a multi-platform operating system for a vast array of vehicles already deployed. The forecasted efficiency improvements for existing platforms using tethered autonomy will exceed 20% while simultaneously reducing emissions and increasing safety for all subsea robots.
The board added that while they are investing heavily into commercialization, they are actively working to minimize G&A costs. Changes to align board cost with the current forecast are underway.
The board has also retained Piper Sandler & Co. to assist in the evaluation of strategic options to maximize shareholder value and the acquisition of 3D At Depth.
KEY QUOTES:
“The market sees our potential and supports our vision of delivering full autonomy to subsea operations – however, the diffusion rate of our solutions requires a significant shift from the current paradigm of human operations to autonomous operations. To eliminate the inertia to change, we recast our vision. We realized the fastest path to full autonomy would be through the deployment of ‘tethered/augmented autonomy.’ This allows the customer and operators to retain the ability to intervene while simultaneously allowing Nauticus to gather the operational data needed to train our fully autonomous solutions for the future.”
– John Gibson, President of Nauticus
“What Nauticus has planned can truly revolutionize the entire industry – and I don’t use that term lightly. We can now normalize performance of ROV operators because you will no longer have disparities between skill levels of employees. This obviously provides substantial safeguards to any company using this technology.”
– Sean Halpin, Head of Autonomous Solutions
“We are creating a win-win situation for ROV operators. We are not asking them to give up complete control. These robots are not replacing jobs, but instead are making them both easier and more reliable.”
– Chuck Claunch, Co-head of Software Solutions
“It’s not dissimilar to when pilots first needed to adjust to automation in the airline industry – they didn’t lose their jobs – they gained more reliable support to enjoy them.”
– Paul Dinh, Co-head of Software Solutions
