The folks at Saildrone, who recently made history by sending an ocean drone into the eye of a hurricane, are celebrating another milestone today. Saildrone has just received an investment of $100 million to grow its capabilities in climate data, ocean mapping, and maritime intelligence solutions.
The highly successful Series C funding round brings the total funding given to the US-owned and operated company to $190 million. Saildrone says it will use the new financing to expand the data insight teams and scale its go-to-market products that are based on data collected from a fleet of uncrewed surface vehicles.
Powered primarily by wind and solar power, Saildrone’s ocean drones have sailed over 500,000 nautical miles to date and clocked more than 15,000 days at sea in some of the harshest conditions on the planet.
Navigating to the heart of Hurricane Sam is a prime example, wherein Saildrone was able to take scientific measurements and HD video to transform our understanding of hurricane forecasting. Here’s a sample video:
That said, it’s worth noting that Saildrone’s capabilities are not limited to collecting scientific data for climate intelligence and high-resolution bathymetric mapping of the ocean floor alone.
The company also uses proprietary machine learning to provide marine domain awareness (MDA/ISR) for law enforcement and homeland security applications such as policing IUU fishing, counter-narcotics operations, and marine sanctuary protection.
In the meantime, Richard Jenkins, Saildrone founder and CEO, comments on the new funding:
The combination of the most tried and tested autonomous ocean technology with the partnership of some of the most experienced venture capitalists in the world consolidates our industry leadership and enables our rapid growth path to meet the needs of our customers.
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