Online Oceans raises £4m from Seraphim Space and others

Humphreys Law is pleased to have advised Online Oceans on its £4 million seed financing, with the funds raised to help scale autonomous surface vessel manufacturing and fleet software for the defence and maritime security market.

Founded by George Morton and Alistair Douglas, Online Oceans is building a new model for persistent maritime coverage.  Its Scout autonomous surface vessel — compact, solar-powered and designed for long endurance — pairs with Tether, a cloud-based command-and-control platform that allows operators to manage missions, monitor assets and access data in real time.  Together, they enable the deployment of dense, continuously connected fleets for missions including anti-submarine warfare, protection of subsea infrastructure, border security and counter-narcotics operations.

The business is founded on the premise that persistent maritime coverage has long been prohibitively expensive.  Existing approaches rely on crewed vessels with high operating costs, or on autonomous systems too costly to deploy at scale, resulting in intermittent rather than continuous coverage. Online Oceans has engineered Scout around a low unit cost, long endurance and continuous connectivity, built specifically for fleet-scale deployment rather than one-off missions.

The round was led by Seraphim Space, with participation from Peter Rive, co-founder of SolarCity; Frank Thieser and Florian Seibel, founders of Quantum Systems; and Koro Capital. The proceeds will be used to scale manufacturing, support customer deployments, and expand the company’s capacity to serve growing demand across defence and commercial markets.  While building from Europe, Online Oceans is positioning itself to address global demand for persistent maritime monitoring.

Humphreys Law