Hi there, Welcome to the 128th edition of Heartcore Insights, curated with 🖤 by the Heartcore Team. If you missed the past newsletters, you can catch up here. Now, let’s dive in! Prepared Mind – Defence (Maritime Environments)On Maritime Autonomy – Looking Below the SurfaceMaritime autonomy is coming. After years of lagging behind the aerial and terrestrial robotics revolution, we are experiencing a new wave of startups emerging to tackle some of the ocean’s unsolved problem formulations. With tools that are finally good enough to matter for industrial, recreational and military applications. We believe the “why now?” is compelling: the foundational hardware appears robust enough to allow for autonomy advancements. Sensors are improving dramatically in many cases in conjunction with unit costs coming down. Energy density remains a challenge but we believe clever workarounds and compression and advancements in battery systems are becoming increasingly self-sustaining. Other than energy, our observations are that the biggest remaining hurdles, real-time autonomy, robust navigation in GPS-denied environments and reliable underwater communications are largely addressable through advanced software, often in conjunction with specialised hardware. We have known through the years investing that these are the types of challenging but solvable problems that the most visionary and dedicated founders like to chew on. Even so, we would not like to invest in a category if we were to believe that you’d be building in a vacuum (double entendre). Crucially, we believe there will be real demand for new maritime solutions coming online. Signals from existing providers, both scaleups and incumbents, show that the market need is not theoretical:
All in all, these are the types of technical challenges we believe can lead to meaningful enabling technologies and wonderful companies that we’d like to invest in at Heartcore 🖤. Despite covering over 70% of our planet, the subsea world remains largely unmapped and poorly understood. Efforts to monitor it have been prohibitively expensive and episodic, dependent on manned vessels, tethered robots and cumbersome docking, transmission and infrastructure requirements. Forward-thinking startups like Bedrock Ocean Exploration are fundamentally changing this paradigm by offering autonomous, full-stack solutions for high-resolution seabed mapping that drastically reduces the cost and complexity of marine surveys. Similarly, Saildrone, another standout and early mover, has developed solar- and wind-powered surface vehicles capable of persistently loitering in vast ocean regions for months on end, continuously gathering critical climate and surveillance data. Both examples of companies solving specific maritime-environment problem formulations to give them a considerable first-mover advantage, which appears like it is theirs to lose. What began as essential tools for environmental science and offshore infrastructure inspection is increasingly recognised as valuable for national security and critical resource management.
This convergence of technological readiness and strategic urgency is what makes this space compelling to us. Notable geopolitical events, such as the Nord Stream pipeline and subsea cables sabotage and increased Russian naval activity off the coast of Britain and in the Baltic Sea, have starkly highlighted the vulnerability of critical subsea assets. The ability to monitor these environments persistently and autonomously is not only about bringing a new capability online; it has also always been a high order strategic dependency which is now being considered with a higher sense of urgency among innovators and in the prospective buyer universe. There are critical subsystems where more innovation will happen. Among point solutions, for example, sensor systems that work reliably in murky or highly dynamic underwater conditions, internal navigation systems and data transmission are interesting areas that will keep evolving. All delightful categories in their own right that we are looking to further educate ourselves in. In addition, we believe there is a need for superior software: operating systems that can manage complex autonomy at the edge, orchestrate intricate swarms of vehicles, enable real-time decision-making in challenging environments and resist spoofing in GPS-denied zones. Communications remain a significant bottleneck: acoustic signals are inherently slow, optical solutions are power-hungry and robust mesh networks underwater are still nascent. Navigation without satellites demands sophisticated sensor fusion, dynamically updated preloaded maps and real-time environmental adaptation. Onboard compute power remains critically limited by energy constraints, which makes low-power edge inference an interesting challenge to keep tackling and possibly a source for deep competitive differentiation. The waterways present themselves as a true “platform play”. Real-world use cases are multiplying rapidly and we believe there is more to come as second- and third-order effects from the “intelligence layer” maturing. To our best knowledge, offshore wind operators spend an estimated 30% of their OPEX on monitoring and maintenance, most of it conducted through expensive, crewed missions. Subsea cable monitoring, once seen as an exotic need, has rapidly evolved into a critical service category with urgent demand yet no or limited reliable solutions. Aquaculture operators are leveraging intelligent cameras and sonar (spearheaded to my knowledge by the likes of Optoscale) to optimise feeding regimens and detect disease early, ensuring sustainability. Port authorities are actively looking to automate security and inspection workflows for enhanced safety and efficiency. The quality data needed for climate researchers is undeniable, including longitudinal data on ocean currents, critical carbon sinks and methane emissions to build more accurate models and inform policy. Every meteorologist I have ever met always seems like they are looking to layer on an incremental piece of information to deliver the highest quality forecasts: talk about enabler. There is an inherent dual-use nature to most of the companies we have come across/envision. Platforms built for civil applications, whether for detailed mapping, persistent surveillance or autonomous maintenance, can/should often be possible to repurpose for military functions with limited modification.
No blog post on maritime autonomy is complete without a wink to our strengths on the European continent! We already know there is plenty of technical brilliance and stamina around. We are particularly drawn to roboticists, who have built rugged, field-proven systems in leading academic labs such as NTNU, KTH, ETH, UdG, Chalmers, Oxbridge and MBARI (I should not have mentioned anyone, well aware there are plenty who have been forgotten!!!). The nature of our waterways also lends itself to European ex-military operators who have experienced firsthand the critical intelligence blind spots in challenging maritime settings and operational imperatives.
Fewer places seem better placed than the Nordic countries to problem-solve in Arctic or Baltic Sea environments. Considering our own home base in Copenhagen, we can’t help but observe that geography is a strong lever for sovereignty. If you or someone you know is doing something in the space, we’d love to learn from you! PS: I quite enjoy Samuel Burrell’s weekly roundups on defence: What matters in dual-use & defence tech? ~ Björn Nilsen, Principal, Heartcore Capital
{Who would have known that Heartcore and our friends at Prosus are the only other funds referenced explicitly by name in this report? See page 59 ;)}
{‘Seemingly no ARR is created equal’ (our title suggestion)}
🇪🇺 Notable European early-stage rounds
🇺🇸 Notable US early-stage rounds
🔭 Notable later stage rounds
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Tuesday, June 24, 2025
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