Task Force 59, a US Navy group focused on autonomous maritime technology, brought Seasats to Bahrain to participate in the Digital Horizon event. Over the course of approximately three weeks, Seasats demonstrated the ability to conduct ocean missions with persistence, scalability, and discretion.
Seasats announced today that it has accepted a strategic investment from L3Harris Technologies, a global aerospace and defense technology innovator. Under this new collaboration, Seasats’ autonomous ocean vehicles will pair with cutting-edge products from L3Harris to create innovative maritime solutions for customers across a range of government and commercial markets.
Seasats has been awarded a Small Business Innovation and Research (SBIR) grant by the National Science Foundation (NSF). Seasats’ work will focus on autonomous systems that comply with the COLREGs, a conventional set of navigational rules followed by crewed vessels around the world.
After successfully completing the Greentown Labs and Techstars accelerators, finishing pilot projects in science and commercial mapping, and providing demonstrations for DoD customers, Seasats closed a $1M pre-seed round. These funds will be used to expand the team and accelerate production.
Almost 10 years ago, Make Magazine featured the founders of Seasats when they were working on an early predecessor called Scout. Today, Make has returned to catch up and find out how Scout sparked their journey to founding a full-fledged ocean autonomy company.
Seasats’ first customer missions were completed in collaboration with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography’s Bowman Lab. Using an X3 set up for water sampling, Seasats made it possible for the Bowman Lab to collect and analyze water from offshore without crewed missions. The results of this work were presented in a paper at the 2021 Oceans Conference in San Diego.