Context:
We’re living in an era where maritime infrastructure is the invisible backbone of modern economies. It’s easy to forget, but subsea communications cables now carry 99% of all internet traffic. 80% of global trade still moves by sea. Container freight volume has exploded—up 16x in the last 40 years. Offshore wind is set to be a trillion-dollar buildout over the next two decades. Oil & gas remains the largest ocean-based industry, with deepwater O&G growing 10x since 1990.
Market Signal:
But here’s the narrative break: the threat vectors are multiplying, fast. Multiple maritime frontlines have become active theaters of geopolitical conflict (think: South China Sea, Middle East, Europe). Latent risks like piracy and illegal fishing persist, but the toolkit for disruption has never been more diverse—cable-cutting drones, comms interference, narco-subs, state-backed fishing fleets operating in legal grey zones.
The autonomy stack is maturing rapidly, and that’s only going to make things more complex. Starlink and NVIDIA GPUs are accelerating autonomy progress. Surface autonomy is nearly solved (see: Saronic), and underwater drone swarms are coming up fast.
Takeaways:
The ocean is the critical infrastructure that is always forgotten about until it breaks. And the advances in autonomy are going to mean we see exponentially more threats in exponentially more places. Innovation for defense needs to expand beyond building for naviess
Asks:
We’re excited to meet founders building for these gaps. Whether you’re working on the obvious (defense, data, batteries) or going a layer deeper (ISR for commercial infra, persistent maritime monitoring, empowering the coast guard layer)—hit reply and we want to hear from you.