Saildrone - an autonomous sailing vessel developed for scientific missions recently pivoted to military markets. This April 2026 magazine mock-up shows one of its vessels configured to launch missiles.

Meeting a Massive Demand for Ocean Drones

Saildrone built its name on autonomous sailing vessels designed for scientific observation in some of the ocean’s most punishing environments, including sailing into hurricanes and across the Arctic. It became a favorite of NOAA researchers, academics and some conservation minded investors. In April 2026, the company produced a magazine mock-up showing one of its vessels equipped to launch missiles, a demonstration of its autonomous defense capabilities, and a signal of how firmly it has geared its recent strategy toward defense. It set off a wave of criticism from early supporters who had backed the platform for its scientific mission, with comments on the company’s social media posts calling it a “sad statement” about the field’s drift from science toward war; other responses were considerably harsher. But one commenter offered the opposite read: that this was simply the logical next step, and that defense contracts pay better than oceanography ever will.

That tension sits at the center of a broader shift now playing out across ocean tech. The total addressable market (TAM) for surface and underwater drones was valued at approximately $5 billion, and is projected to reach nearly $14 billion over the next decade, and defense is a primary driver of the growth.

Saronic’s uncrewed vessels have secured major Navy contracts. Will advanced boats like these ever be deployed against illegal fishing fleets in peacetime?

Saronic, an autonomous surface vessel company, recently landed a $392 million Navy contract and opened a boat-building facility in Texas. Its Corsair vessel made headlines this year for a remotely piloted rescue of two downed helicopter pilots in the Strait of Hormuz, a first-of-its-kind mission that put no Navy personnel at risk. Unmanned surface vessels (USVs) and autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) have become standard tools for the U.S. Navy, as well as for Ukraine and China, spanning observation, payload delivery, rescue, and attack. The same platforms that keep sailors out of harm’s way could also track illegal fishing vessels, map marine protected areas, or run fish stock and endangered species assessments.

Ulysses, an underwater drone startup, tells a similar story to Saildrone. Founded as ‘Ulysses Ecosystem Engineering’ to support seagrass restoration, with customers including the Great Barrier Reef Foundation, pivoted toward defense applications, and drew significant investment from a16z and Booz Allen Hamilton. It now partners with the Navy and defense contractors on subsea surveillance, infrastructure protection, and mine countermeasures. In a 2024 TechCrunch article, the company claimed its drones could plant seagrass 100 times faster than volunteer divers and at a fraction of the cost, and divers have limitations for underwater dive times, depths, safety, and visibility. Defense funding may yet subsidize the restoration performance improvements, but only if defense contracts do not consume the near-term roadmap.

Planet offers a useful case study in what dual-use maturity can look like. The publicly traded satellite imaging company landed defense contracts in 2026 that include U.S. Navy maritime domain awareness work, including tracking ships in the Pacific. Yet Planet is equally known for environmental compliance work, tracking methane pollution and combating illegal deforestation, as well as developing Centinela, a tool that helps scientists, conservationists, and stewards monitor and safeguard 50 of the world’s most vulnerable biodiversity hotspots.

That dual-use identity may be less a contradiction than a preview of where the conservation technology agenda is heading. As the conservation field shifts from writing protected-area policy to actually enforcing it, remote sensing tools, satellites especially, are becoming indispensable for stopping illegal activity on land and at sea. PierSight, an SOA and Seabird Ventures portfolio company, is built for exactly that mandate: a constellation of satellites providing persistent maritime surveillance to combat illegal fishing and oil dumping, while supporting more efficient and safer marine operations. The company has won large contracts to monitor India’s entire coastal waters.

Follow the Ocean Contracts

None of this is entirely new. Oil and gas, shipping, fishing, and the military have always been dominant customers of the traditional blue economy, and most ocean innovation since World War II has been built to serve them. What’s changed is the volume of defense money flowing into ocean autonomy and robotics specifically, and the scale mismatch between potential government customers: the U.S. Navy’s budget (including the Marine Corps) is roughly 47 times NOAA’s ($292.2 billion versus $6.17 billion). For startups reaching maturity and needing to show larger contracts to larger investors, the math is straightforward, especially as R&D grants and contract vehicles at NOAA, DOE, and EPA have been depleted for conservation and pollution-reduction work. As one ocean impact investor put it bluntly in a recent conversation: if sustainable seaweed farms could launch missiles, they would raise more money.

Ocean Impact Investors: Engage, or Abandon Ship?

There’s a strong argument that ocean impact investors shouldn’t simply cede this territory. Defense capital can subsidize R&D capabilities for better sensors, longer endurance, lower per-unit costs that later gets redeployed for conservation missions: monitoring marine protected areas, running fish stock assessments, tracking marine mammals to avoid ship strikes, or disrupting illegal fishing and hazardous material dumping. Impact investors can also open doors to customers and use cases that defense-only backers would never pursue. Autonomous vessels and underwater drones can also reduce fuel consumption relative to crewed operations, a benefit that holds regardless of who is operating them. If ocean health investors have a seat at the table, the thinking goes, they are better positioned to steer dual-use technology toward pure play conservation-positive deployments and even use financial returns from dual-use bets into higher-impact, harder-to-monetize work elsewhere.

The Case for Caution from Conservation Funders

The counterargument is just as grounded. When a company’s engineering roadmap and investor base skew overwhelmingly toward defense customers, it’s fair to ask whether “dual-use” is doing real work as a label, or simply providing ethical cover. If 90%+ of a company’s contract revenue is military, the conservation mission risks becoming a talking point rather than a priority. There’s also a capital-allocation question: do these companies actually need support from ocean impact focused VCs, accelerators, and incubators at all, given how much capital is already available to them through defense contracts and defense-focused or even sector-agnostic investors? And even setting aside financial questions, there’s an unresolved ethical discomfort in profiting from military applications, however indirectly, that a purely returns-based argument doesn’t fully answer. It also makes impact measurement extremely difficult as there is no accepted method for attributing conservation outcomes to a platform whose primary mission is military operations. And one of the tougher issues is that early investors writing small checks rarely have the leverage to dictate which customers a startup ultimately pursues as it scales.

Charting a Course

There isn’t a clean resolution here, and reasonable people in the ocean impact investing sector are in different camps: many ocean VC funds are pivoting toward defense exposure, while others are deliberately screening for products with no military application. What does seem clear is that more capital flowing into ocean autonomy and robotics isn’t inherently bad, but its uses raise the bar for conservation scrutiny. Investors, accelerators, LPs, philanthropists, and the startups themselves should be pressed to demonstrate real, trackable conservation deployments and outcomes, not just the theoretical possibility of them.

In practice, that means asking a list of uncomfortable questions before writing a check. What share of current and projected pipeline revenue is defense? Is there a named conservation customer, or only a theoretical conservation use case? Does the product roadmap fund the conservation application, or merely tolerate it? And are there governance mechanisms like board seats, side letters, milestone-linked tranches, that keep the conservation deployments alive once the defense contract gets bigger? Funds should also be candid with their own LPs: many foundation and DAF mandates carry explicit weapons-related exclusions, and “dual-use” will not survive that screen on its own.

The environmental upsides of these technologies are real, in some cases, but they need to be demonstrated consistently rather than marketed in pitch decks and on websites. The question isn’t whether ‘dual-use’ ocean technology will keep growing; given the economics of automation and the current military contracting environment, it will. It is whether ocean-health focused capital and customers show up early enough, and with enough leverage, to shape how these tools get used once they exist.

By Matt Mulrennan, Head of Investments.

For those of us who have spent years in climate tech - supporting startups and investing - the IPO of Fervo Energy felt bigger than a single company milestone. My LinkedIn feed was filled with accelerator leaders posting celebrations, early-stage investors highlighting the round where they first got involved, and smiling founders ringing the bell at the Nasdaq.

But underneath the celebration was something much more important: market validation.

Fervo’s rise demonstrated that the market is rewarding hard infrastructure again in the cleantech sector, not just new software abstractions, carbon accounting platforms, or incremental ESG efficiencies, but companies building new energy systems. It also reinforced something many climate investors have been saying for years that the transition to resilient, domestic, low-carbon infrastructure is now a macroeconomic necessity and smart investing, not a niche sustainability thesis. The Iran war and AI data center boom have accelerated these demands for localized and low cost energy, with a massive shift globally to diversify away from fossil fuels.

The significance of the Fervo moment is not simply that a geothermal company reached public markets. It is that the ecosystem behind it worked. Incubators and accelerators like Elemental Impact, Activate and Berkeley Lab helped at the earliest scientific R&D stages and then derisked early deployment to support the missing middle for climate startups by backing Fervo’s first of a kind projects. Climate-focused venture firms without big namesakes stayed committed through capital-intensive growth stages. Strategic partners validated commercial demand and the government created incentives. Fervo’s early partners with equity have been rewarded with sizable returns, and that liquidity for funds and LP investors is incredibly important to keep the climate innovation ecosystem flowing.

This is what “cleantech 2.0” was supposed to look like with capital-intensive climate infrastructure companies doing hard things and ultimately becoming new age industry leaders. As the CEO of Fervo Tim Latimer made clear in a blog post “Technology breakthroughs do not occur because of a flash of insight in the modern era, they happen because hundreds of employees, partners, suppliers, regulators, customers, financiers and more come together to make a shared vision possible.” We need this, but for the oceans.

A recent gathering during World Ocean Week at the Foundation House in Greenwich, Connecticut called ‘Riding the Wave: Blue Finance for Restoring Ocean Health’ assembled key practitioners and leaders investing in the regenerative blue economy, and SOA/Seabird Ventures participated in brainstorm round table discussions about how to grow the ocean impact investing field. It was widely discussed about the importance of having more ‘narwhals’ - the unicorns of the sea - and how it can help popularize and familiarize the ocean economy with new investors. Many of the ocean exits and acquisitions have been private to date, with limited headlines or details, so the obvious question for those of us building in the new blue economy is:

What will be the ocean tech equivalent of a popular IPO, like Fervo?

The answer matters because oceans are no longer a peripheral climate category. They are rapidly becoming central to energy, logistics, defense, food systems, freshwater, climate adaptation, and global data infrastructure.

For years, ocean innovation was often framed as academic science instruments, service providers for oil and gas, or philanthropically important tools for conservation, but not necessarily something aligned for early stage venture. That narrative is changing and investment has grown 7X in the last several years. The emerging generation of ocean companies use cutting edge technology; robotics, autonomous systems, advanced materials, maritime electrification, sensors, satellites, AI, and coastal resource infrastructure for resilience.

And importantly, the macro tailwinds now resemble the same conditions that enabled climate infrastructure breakouts:

• Shipping and maritime industries face decarbonization pressure as new regulations emerge at the International Maritime Organization and within the E.U.

• Defense and subsea security spending are accelerating with billions for autonomy and underwater drones - how can these tools be used for conservation?

• Offshore wind deployment is increasing 16% per year globally.

• AI infrastructure is driving enormous energy and water demands - the oceans can help.

• Ocean monitoring has become both a strategic and conservation priority.

Several recent financings and contracts illustrate where momentum is building and where we could ostensibly see a new ocean IPO:

• bound4blue* raised $44M for autonomous sail systems that significantly reduces cargo ship fuel consumption.

• Navier* secured a $100M contract to build a hydrofoiling electric boat transportation network for the Maldives.

• Panthalassa raised $140M for wave-powered AI data center infrastructure.

• Magrathea has raised $100M from investors and contracts to produce magnesium metals from brine and seawater.

• Blue Energy raised $380M for nuclear reactors built in shipyards.

• XOCEAN raised $119M for uncrewed surface vessels that collect ocean data for offshore mapping, and subsea infrastructure industries.

• Tidal Vision raised $140M to transform chitosan into alternative industrial materials.

What is striking is not simply the size of these raises and customer contracts but also the players, mainstream VCs like a16z are getting involved, as well as large climate funds moving into the ocean sector. These recent startup raises represent a diversity of sectors emerging from ocean innovation and show that the oceans touch nearly every major industrial system on Earth. The oceans can help solve our greatest problems, so the IPOs should follow.

If you want to learn more about our portfolio companies and our thesis about ocean impact investing, you can check out the SOA Ecopreneur Network and Seabird Ventures. If you are innovating or investing in this space, you can contact matt@soalliance.org

*Navier and Bound4Blue are backed by Sustainable Ocean Alliance and Seabird Ventures and are members of the Ecopreneur Network.

The Ocean Is the Backbone of the Global Economy

The modern world runs on ocean infrastructure, often invisibly:

• ~90% of global trade moves by ship, and it is a growing source of emissions; fleets are looking for ways off of inflationary and unstable fossil fuels.

• ~99% of international data travels through cables crossing ocean basins; the entire digital infrastructure is reliant on this subsea infrastructure.

• 3.3 billion people rely on seafood as a key source of protein, and aquaculture is expected to be 60% of seafood production by 2030.

• The ocean economy has grown 2.5 times since 1995, outpacing the global average.

The Most Important System We Barely Understand

Despite its importance, the ocean remains largely unexplored for value-added products and services, and unmonitored for protection.

• ~91% of marine species remain undiscovered - ocean animals create unique chemical compounds and evolved specifically for the marine habitat, bioprospecting is leading to new cures for Alzheimer’s, skin cancer, as well as new chemical solutions such as anti-biofouling.

• Less than 10% of the ocean is actively monitored - one of the biggest threats to shipping companies, and legal fishing is illegal and unregulated, ‘dark’ fleets which undermine commerce, harm marine life, and create billions in losses.

This creates a rare dynamic: a system that is both critical to global stability and largely unknown. With new tools for ocean exploration from underwater drones, sensors, and satellites, lies immense potential for new biomedical breakthroughs and biomaterials, to entirely new industries built on ocean data and intelligence.

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A Climate Engine and a Climate Solution

The ocean is also one of our greatest climate allies:

• The ocean captures ~25–30% of carbon emissions annually, and startups are trying to enhance these processes through scaling nature-based restoration and engineered carbon dioxide removal technologies.

• Coastal ecosystems like mangroves and seagrasses store carbon up to 10x more efficiently than forests, and the ocean is the largest reservoir for carbon in the biosphere.

• Offshore wind energy alone can supply 18X of our global energy needs - and this can be colocated with wave energy, or in some places, floating solar. New advances are being made to power offshore AI data centers entirely with wave energy.

Ocean-based solutions via renewable energy, blue carbon, and maritime decarbonization represent a significant portion of the climate mitigation needed to reach global targets.

The Ocean is Key to the Future of Food, Water, and Sustainable Minerals

Global demand for protein is rising, and the ocean will play a defining role in meeting it sustainably.

• Aquaculture is now the fastest-growing food production sector globally, but it needs more solutions for efficiency and sustainability. It is projected to supply ~60% of seafood by 2030. Ocean-based food systems could expand significantly with innovation in alternative feeds, fish welfare, efficiencies, and regenerative practices

• 300M people are supplied with freshwater from desalination - in some arid regions, this is 50-75% of a country’s freshwater supply, and due to significant recent changes in water security, desalination can be one of the most stable sources of freshwater.

• 37 billion gallons of brine waste are created from seawater daily through desalination. Instead of discharging this back into the ocean, this resource can be used to extract key minerals and metals important to the clean energy economy, like magnesium, which is a lightweight metal key to the electrification of cars, ships, planes, agricultural equipment, and construction machinery.

Investing in ocean innovation is investing in the future of global food, water, and minerals security important to the energy transition.

A Massive Investment Gap

Despite all of this, the ocean remains one of the most underfunded sectors in climate and impact investing:

• The ocean investment field has grown 7X over the last five years, showing how underleveraged this opportunity has been.

• Less than 1% of philanthropic funding goes to ocean conservation, but funding has increased over the last decade, and venture philanthropy for ocean technologies has emerged as a new sector advancing innovation.

• Yet there remains an estimated $175 billion annual funding gap to achieve sustainable ocean outcomes, and there is a strong mismatch between the opportunity and the necessary resources.

This disconnect between importance and investment is where opportunity lives.

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Two Ocean Economies

Today, we are at an inflection point between two models:

The traditional blue economy extracts, depletes, and pollutes. And the new sustainable blue economy innovates, regenerates, and scales solutions.

The shift is already underway. Ocean investing is now on a similar track like biotech investing in the 2010s, and while it has followed parallel growth from overall climate tech, it is now quickly becoming its own standalone field with several dedicated ocean VC funds. Emerging sectors from offshore renewable energy, sustainable aquaculture, shipping decarbonization, to ocean data platforms and plastic alternatives are fast-growing markets. These sectors are attracting increasing attention from global investors interested in supporting resilience, intelligence, and circularity.

Why We Invest

We invest because we believe the ocean is the defining system of this century, environmentally, economically, and socially, and we want to support our companies in the long term.

Our model is built on a simple insight:

Venture philanthropy can take the earliest risk. Venture capital can then scale what works. At Sustainable Ocean Alliance (SOA) and Seabird Ventures, we get to do both, investing in and supporting companies at the earliest stages through SOA’s Ecopreneur Network and scaling what works through our affiliated VC Fund Seabird Ventures.

Through catalytic capital and early-stage investment, we support ocean startups at the moment when they are most overlooked and most capable of shaping entirely new sustainable industries.

We focus on ventures that are:

• Driven by measurable ocean impact

• Positioned for global, market-scale growth

• Building solutions across climate, food systems, pollution, and ocean data

The next generation of sustainable investing is being focused on massive subsectors like energy, materials, circular economy, and we believe ocean investing will be one of the most important.

The ocean absorbs our emissions, feeds billions, and powers global trade. And yet, it remains underexplored, underfunded, and undervalued. A healthy ocean is the foundation of a stable climate, a resilient economy, and a livable future. That combination is rare and makes it ripe for impactful innovation and smart investors.

Investing in the ocean is not just about protecting what we love; it’s tapping Earth’s greatest resource, the ocean, to help solve our greatest challenges.

If you want to learn more about our portfolio companies, you can check out the SOA Ecopreneur Network and Seabird Ventures. If you are innovating or investing in this space, you can contact matt@soalliance.org.