The firm plans to expand its fleet of low emissions uncrewed surveying vessels to meet growing demand from customers including offshore wind developers and marine protection agencies.
XOCEAN, an Irish-based marine data acquisition company, has secured €115m in funding from investors to finance its expansion, as interest in the blue economy builds.
The firm uses uncrewed surface vessels (USVs) to gather and process marine data for clients, including offshore wind developers, the energy industry and governments.
The funding group includes US investor S2G Ventures, which helped structure the deal, as well as oil industry-backed Climate Investment, Morgan Stanley’s 1GT fund, and Chicago-based privately-held management firm CC Industries.
XOCEAN said it planned to use the funding to expand its activities in the offshore energy and civil hydrography sectors to cater for growing global demand for high-quality seabed mapping, environmental monitoring, data on the health of fisheries and other subsea activities.
The company’s remotely-controlled USV fleet is capable of acquiring and relaying detailed geophysical data during long missions, providing a low-cost and safer alternative to manned survey vessels.
The USVs are also cleaner to run than crewed vessels. Their hybrid power systems use a combination of solar energy and a micro diesel generator with propulsion via twin electric thrusters. According to XOCEAN, the USV uses 1,000 times less fuel than a conventional survey ship.
Francis O’Sullivan, managing director for S2G, said XOCEAN provided an investment opportunity at the intersection of the energy and ocean sectors.
“Working with many of the world’s leading energy companies, XOCEAN has reimagined how the geophysical data central to unlocking the blue economy’s potential can be delivered,” he said.
Supporting offshore wind
The rapid expansion of the offshore wind industry is expected to be a major driver for growth. The company, which was founded in 2017, said it had supported the development of more than 48 gigawatts of offshore wind energy so far and had collected and processed over 4.9 million gigabytes of data across all of its surveying activities.
James Ives, XOCEAN’s founder and CEO, said the firm’s mission was to deliver data that drives the sustainable development of the oceans.
“Today, we are providing this service for many of the world’s largest energy companies, supporting the development of clean renewable energy globally,” he said.
Those users include wind power firms such as Denmark’s Ørsted and the UK’s SSE Renewables, as well as energy firms including bp, Shell and Equinor. Other users of such data include carbon capture and storage developers and government agencies. The UK Hydrographic Office used XOCEAN vessels to provide detailed seabed surveys around the coast in 2023 to improve the safety of maritime navigation.
Funding group member Climate Investment is an independent venture capital firm launched by members of the Oil and Gas Climate Initiative, which was set up in 2014 by oil companies to help coordinate the industry’s efforts to cut greenhouse emissions.
Its presence in the group is indicative of the benefits of XOCEAN’s services to the hydrocarbons industry, which needs geophysical data to help build, maintain and decommission pipelines, rigs and other infrastructure more efficiently, while also reducing environmental and climate change impacts such as pipeline leaks.
Investor interest in the wider blue economy has been growing recently, but remains a fraction of the $175bn a year estimated to be required to meet United Nations Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 14 on protecting the world’s oceans and marine ecosystems. As Kris Atkinson, portfolio manager at Fidelity, notes in our 2025 outlook for impact investing, SDG 14 remains the least funded of all 17 UN SDGs, requiring an increase in institutional capital to get it moving.
