The ocean covers 70% of the planet and carries 90% of its trade. Almost none of it is watched in real time.
Maritime Robotics has spent two decades building the machines meant to close that gap: uncrewed surface vessels that sail themselves through weather that keeps crews in port, hold station for weeks, and stream back the metocean and acoustic data that operators plan against.
In September, the Trondheim company added Omnes Capital, a €6.7 billion infrastructure investor, to its ownership group. That sits on top of a €28 million growth round led by Mustard Seed + Partners in June. Both point at the same task. Turning a proven platform into a production line.
A twenty-year head start on an empty ocean
Maritime Robotics was founded in 2005, well before autonomy became a category. Its first business was the part few people see: the navigation and control systems that let a surface vessel run itself, installed on everything from small survey craft to crewed ships that wanted one fewer hand on the bridge.
The vessels came later. The company now sells integrated sea drones — a hull, an autonomy stack, and a modular payload bay that swaps between survey sonar, environmental sensors, and acoustic arrays. One civil delivery, the survey and inspection vessel Argus, was designed and built for the subsea survey firm Argeo.
That head start is the whole asset. Autonomy on water is unforgiving. Salt, motion, and weeks without maintenance break systems that look flawless in a demo.
From experiments to fleets
The clearest signal in the company's story is the shift in what customers order. Pilots and research charters have given way to fleet-level deployments for industrial and defence clients, with hundreds of systems delivered over two decades.
CHRONICLE: MARITIME ROBOTICS
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2005 ──── 2024 ──── 2025 ────── 2026 ─────── ◉ NOW ──── ▶ NEXT
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Founded $12M NOK258.8M €28M round Omnes Production
Trondheim raise revenue + Omnes Capital and portfolio
(Sep) +72% entry invests scale-up
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Delivered hundreds of autonomous systems across two decades.
Source: company announcements, 2024–26
Revenue followed. The company reported operating revenue of NOK258.8 million in 2025, up 72% from NOK150.8 million the year before — roughly five-fold growth over five years. Demand, on its own numbers, is not the constraint.
Who actually buys a sea drone
Two customer classes are pulling hardest. Offshore energy operators need inspection and survey work done at lower cost and lower risk than a crewed vessel allows; a long-endurance drone can loiter over a pipeline field for a fraction of the fuel and none of the people. The second class has moved fastest: agencies that want persistent awareness of what sits on and under the sea surface.
The same platform serves both. That is the design bet — one hull, one autonomy stack, payloads swapped for the mission. A maintenance contract and a security contract can ride the same production line.
We are now past the experimentation phase.— Vegard Evjen Hovstein, co-founder and CEO, Maritime Robotics
The capital stack reflects it. June's €28 million round was led by Mustard Seed + Partners, with EnvisionTech, Nysnø Climate Investment, and Umoe alongside. Omnes Capital's September entry brings in a fund that invests across energy-transition and digital infrastructure. Neither announcement disclosed a valuation.
The thin margin under the growth
Revenue growth is not the same as profit, and the accounts are blunt about it. Operating profit slipped to NOK2.3 million in 2025 from NOK5.3 million in 2024 — a rounding error against NOK258.8 million of revenue.
Maritime Robotics annual revenue
Operating revenue reached NOK258.8M in 2025, up from NOK150.8M in 2024, while operating profit narrowed to NOK2.3M. · Company accounts, 2025
That is what a hardware scale-up looks like before it bends. Building hulls, qualifying payloads, and opening production capacity all land on the income statement before the volume that pays for them arrives. Five-fold revenue growth in five years describes a business buying market share on purpose.
One modular platform now serves two markets — offshore energy and maritime security — and both are ordering in fleets.
Revenue is compounding; profit is deferred while the line is built out.
What the fleet transition changes
A single autonomous vessel is a curiosity. A fleet is an operator. Once a platform ships in quantity, the value moves from the boat to the data layer it feeds — a persistent sensing grid that others plan around. That is what the June and September rounds are buying capacity for.
As we wrote in October, the U.S. Navy moved to order 30 uncrewed surface vessels of its own, spread across three shipyards. That order and Maritime Robotics' scale-up point the same way: sea drones are leaving the pilot phase at scale.
The open question is margin. Anyone can sell a hull. The durable business owns the autonomy, the payload interface, and the data coming back across thousands of open-ocean miles.