Maritime Tech Market Map & Investor List
VCs are warming up to startups in the water
The weather in Chicago has been becoming actually pleasant, and making it more enjoyable to spend time outside.
The dominant geographic features of Chicago, at least the part where I live, are Lake Michigan and the Chicago River. As with most major cities, the water is a huge part of Chicago’s history and layout.
Having said that, there’s more to water than lakes, and the maritime domain presents a rapidly growing space for startups to build.
This week, I’m pleased to share a maritime technology market map and investor list.
Startup Map
This map shows venture-backed startups and selected other companies that I’m tracking as:
solving problems most critical to generating more economic value out of the maritime domain,
using the maritime domain in the most commercially interesting ways, or
incumbents in one of the above two spaces
Trends
Ground effect vehicles
Wing-in-ground effect vehicles seem to be the dominant type of aircraft founders in the maritime space are exploring these days. This is notable because these types of aircraft are not widespread, and rely on physical phenomena known for a while (the Soviets used this technology) but not recently commercialized.
More generally, aerial systems for maritime seem to be an emerging sector in the maritime space.
Uncrewed systems
More and more of these startups are not building crewed vehicles, enabled by mass adoption of AI. Taking the human out of the vehicle cuts down costs and risks considerably in what even supporters should acknowledge is a sector with high costs and uncommon dangers to life and limb.
Startups are building uncrewed systems in many different aspects of maritime. Autonomy is going to raise lots of questions surrounding sustainment and repair on the customer side, but the builders on this list seem to be accounting for it in their public concepts of operations.
Party rounds are popular
On the investor side, party rounds are way more popular than they were in humanoid robotics. Chris Brown at Inspired Capital had an interesting take on this on X earlier this week. I’m not certain I agree, but this list of investors at Seed and Series A definitely feels long.
This list of later-stage investors feels exceptionally long, and is driven exclusively by Anduril, Palantir, and Shield AI. Party rounds seem to have different meanings in early-stage vs later-stage rounds, as the capital requirements are different for the startup and the return profile looks different for the investors.
Pre-seed rounds are unpopular
Most deep tech startups seem to prefer grants and accelerators over institutional pre-seed rounds. This dynamic appears in humanoid robot and space startups as well.
Mahanian theory frames the current landscape
Alfred Thayer Mahan’s work The Influence of Sea Power upon History had a massive influence on maritime strategy during the 1900s. He spends Chapter I exploring the elements of sea power. Mahan concludes that the overwhelming majority of a nation’s sea power is largely a function of:
commercial trade
the navy
access to ports
This continues today in the market map — the overwhelming majority of startups are supporting either commercial enterprise or the defense & intelligence community’s activities.
That’s not to say there isn’t a…boatload…of money to be made in these spaces, because the markets are huge, but they’re also quite well-defined.
They’re also what keep most of these maritime startups operating in or near littoral waters for the time being; that’s where the money is to be made within the current paradigm.
What’s next?
The next generation of great maritime startups, I believe, will break the Mahanian archetypes, and look at commercialization of the ocean for its own sake. There’s two approaches to this that I think sound particularly exciting:
New approaches to resource extraction from (or placement on) underwater terrain
Deep sea mining
Carbon sequestration
Nuclear waste storage
Human habitation on the water in a relatively static configuration
This might look like floating cities on the open ocean with minimal propulsion
It could also look like floating housing along urban waterfronts
If you invest in startups, like my writing, and want to chat about possible career opportunities, don’t hesitate to be in touch. The best way to get ahold of me is via email:
Key Verticals
Here are links to all the startups in the market map.
Surface vehicles
Underwater vehicles
Aerial vehicles
For the purposes of this market map, I consider ground effect vehicles to be aircraft.
Sensors
Software/AI
Investors
Here’s a list of all the financial, institutional, venture capital investors in the startups above (according to PitchBook) that invested in a startup on the map through a pre-seed round, a seed round, or a round with a letter name.1 Firms that have a multi-stage strategy are shown at the first stage where they’ve invested in the field. Within each stage, firms are listed in alphabetical order.
Pre-seed
Seed
Series A
Series B
Series C
Series D
Late-Stage
Growth equity firms are included where appropriate. Excluded categories of investor are: private equity, buyouts, family offices, corporate venture capital funds, funds of funds, hedge funds, generalist asset management funds, and purchasers of secondary shares.
Amidon Heavy Industries and Ulysses come top of mind as well!
Add Impossible Metals and The Metals Company for DSM (nodule harvesting). WestWin Elements tangentially for upstream nickel processing (1st nickel refinery in Continental US) in alignment with CHIPs Act/Critical Minerals supply chain