Hello Ocean Friends,

This week we’re starting a new segment for BlueX, people-to-know interviews. I’m scheduling interviews with founders, investors, and ecosystem mavens. We kick off the first interview with Jake Russell of Orpheus Ocean. Scroll down to see more about Jake’s thoughts on the Blue Economy, future of autonomy, and what’s next.

Best,

Will

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People-To-Know: Orpheus Ocean’s Jake Russell

I sat down with Jake Russell of Orpheus Ocean to ask him a few questions about his company, the Blue Economy, and his future plans.

Will: Thanks for talking with me. First off, tell me about you and your company and how you started.

Jake: Sure, thanks for having me, Will. We are Orpheus Ocean. We're building ultra-scalable methods of access to deep ocean environments for the next wave of ocean industries. I'm Jake Russell, co-founder and CEO of Orpheus, and my co-founder is Casey Machado. We started the company last year, in the summer of 2024, as the result of a venture studio program that I was running at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

My previous employer, Propeller VC, focusing on ocean climate tech companies, gave me the opportunity to work with scientists and engineers at Woods Hole to identify potentially scalable and commercializable technologies and innovations there, and then to spin those out into companies. That's how I started working with my co-founder, Casey. We spent about a year incubating the idea and talking to customers, understanding where in the market this previously-academic innovation could take hold, and then decided to launch the company together and go into business around July of last year. We're now based in New Bedford, Massachusetts, and building our first robot right now.

It's called an AUV, an autonomous underwater vehicle. It's designed to be an ultra-scalable way to access full ocean depth, ~11,000m, and to autonomously interact with the seafloor, something that's previously only been able to be done by Remotely Operated Vehicles. ROVs are large and expensive assets that are often tethered to a vessel on the surface. So Orpheus allows a lot of the same tasks to be done that an ROV typically does but done in an autonomous and non-tethered fashion.

Will: Well, that leads right to the next question: What's the problem you're solving? Why is an AUV superior? And who needs to get to the ocean floor like that?

Jake: Yeah, great question. Emerging industries in the blue economy are demanding data that is deeper, over wider spatial scales, and further from shore than has ever been demanded before. Those industries include offshore wind, which is moving from fixed bottom to floating off the coast of California or the Gulf of Maine, and deep sea mining, which is proposed to occur in areas at depths of 4,000 to 5,000 meters in the Pacific or in the EEZ of Norway.

So those industries and others, including seabed cable construction, carbon sequestration, and the defense sector, are all requiring this deep seabed data at previously unimaginable scales.

The current technologies are very manual, very expensive, and tethered to surface ships. They just are not suitable for reaching the scale and speed that they need this data. So [autonomous vehicles] are a great approach that takes the manual labor out of the equation.

Will: Things are moving pretty fast in the Blue Economy. Where are you [Orpheus Ocean] and where's the broader ecosystem in five years or longer?

Jake: In a word, autonomy, right? Autonomous underwater vehicles have been around for 20 years at this point, but have only just started emerging as a cornerstone for many offshore sectors, especially the ones that are just now emerging like deep sea mining. They’re looking to autonomy as an important pillar of their developing economics.

I think in five years you're going to see a much more robust ecosystem of autonomous assets and that being the foundation for a lot of work that's done offshore. Currently, it is still really manual, really labor intensive, and honestly dangerous for people out at sea. In all blue economy sectors, we're gonna start seeing that rapid shift to autonomy as the technologies finally get to the point where they can be implemented at scale. [

Will: You have written about how the blue economy is a lot like space tech. As you’ve moved into an operator role, is that something you still believe?

Jake: Absolutely. That is still a parallel that I see becoming more and more relevant by the day. In space, especially assets that are leaving Earth's orbit, you lose the ability to have truly live manual control, and you have to start relying more and more on pre-programmed autonomous behavior.

If you have a satellite exploring the moons of Jupiter, you have a very long lag time between Houston and that asset (Editor’s note: its 43 minutes). The main connection I make between space and the ocean is that need for autonomous behavior in extreme and communications denied environments. And that hasn't changed. What has changed is the power of autonomy and the power of onboard AI decision-making to make complex behaviors more reliable and robust.

We take a lot of that philosophy of how do you make it work for sure 100% of the time without human oversight.

Will: Last question, what's the ask you'd want to put out in the world? What organization would you love to collaborate with? What type of people are you looking for? Who do you want to meet for Orpheus Ocean?

Jake: We are looking to make a hire right now to round out our team, specifically someone with ocean startup experience or robotic startup experience. Someone who's been through one or two early-stage startups and can help us turn our prototype into a product that delights customers. So productization of deep prototype and systems thinking, systems engineering, robotics, or field deployment.

Want to connect with Jake directly to talk about underwater robotics? His email is here. What did you think of this new segment? Like it? Hate it? Shoot me an email.

OceanTech Fundings

🌊 Wave energy company Wavepiston raised €900K from Connect the Drops and Unknown Group through The Blue Line BV. | More from Silicon Canals

🐠 Sustainable land based trout and catfish production company Gårdsfisk raised €4.57M co-led by Hatch Blue’s Blue Revolution Fund and Industrifonden. | More from The Fish Site

🧂 Capture6 raised a $27.5M Series A (and project funding) for converting waste brine into both fresh water and carbon removal solutions led by Tetrad Corporation, with Hyundai Motor Group’s ZER01NE Ventures, Energy Capital Ventures, Elemental Impact, Bridge Investment, Sopoong Ventures, Third Derivative, Stan and Jane Rodbell, and the Jacob S Shapiro Foundation. | More from FinSMEs

🐟 Fish byproducts firm SuperGround raised a seed €2.5m investment led by Hatch's Blue Revolution Fund | More from Undercurrent News

🏠 Grid-connected water tank company Mixenergy raised £12M led by Barclays Climate Ventures, with Oxford Science Enterprises, Kiko Ventures (IP Group), Nesta, and EDP Ventures. | More from Tech Funding News

More OceanTech News

Some of the OceanTech articles I liked. Not fundings necessarily, but some great stuff:

💧 EU Grants Repsol $223M For Offshore CO2 Storage Project | The European Commission has announced funding for 77 decarbonization initiatives, with Repsol ‘s proposed CO2 storage project off the coast of Tarragona among the selected projects. | More from Carbon Harold

🔌 Carnegie Clean Energy’s Wave Energy Technology Gets Funding Boost | Australia’s wave energy developer Carnegie Clean Energy has received a €317,945 “milestone payment” from the Basque Energy Agency (Ente Vasco de la Energía – EVE) for its ACHIEVE+ wave energy project. | More from Offshore Energy

🚢 Offshore Support Vessel to Become World’s Longest-Range Hybrid Vessel | Energy service company and tanker operator AET provided details on its planned conversion of one of its support vessels to create a hybrid electric vessel with the world’s longest range. | More from Maritime Executive

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