New Bedford, MA – March 3, 2025 – Orpheus Ocean, an emerging leader in deep sea robotics, today announced the close of its $2.8M Pre-Seed round. This funding will enable the first commercial demonstrations of the Orpheus autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV), a technology that brings revolutionary speed and scale to deep ocean and seafloor data collection.

The funding round is led by Propeller Ventures, an early-stage ocean-climate   venture fund. Propeller helped incubate and commercialize Orpheus out of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, where the technology originated. Other investors joining this financing are Village Global, JetStream, and Climate Capital.

“Orpheus represents a new frontier for autonomy, affordability, and versatility in underwater exploration,” said Steven Fox, partner at Propeller. “They have an outstanding, customer-first team that we are thrilled to support.”

“This funding comes at a critical time for the ocean,” said Jake Russell, CEO of Orpheus Ocean. “We are really just beginning to learn about these largely unknown environments, and our technology will accelerate that understanding. At the same time, there are rapidly growing industries in the blue economy that are demanding data from areas more remote than ever before. We’re making sure our customers have access to this data so they can make the most informed decisions.”

Orpheus Ocean will deploy their first AUV on a customer mission near Guam this May, in partnership with the NOAA and BOEM-sponsored Ocean Exploration Cooperative Institute. Russell says the funding round will also help build out a core technical team of robotics experts, and expand the Orpheus AUV fleet to three vehicles to enable more deployments over the next year.