Red River Insights - Ocean Tech top 10
From blue economy to maritime sovereignty: Europe’s ocean tech stack is becoming robotic, sensorized and dual-use.
Red River Insights - May 2026
Dear friends,
If the ocean economy were a country, it would be the world’s fifth-largest economy. It generates around $2.6 trillion of gross value added, moves more than 80% of global goods, and carries 98% of international internet traffic through sea cables. OECD also notes that only 25% of the seabed has been mapped, which is a useful reminder: the ocean is enormous infrastructure, but still poorly observed.
That scale is not new. What is changing is the strategic reading of it. The ocean is still a climate, food, energy and logistics surface, but it is also becoming economic infrastructure, data infrastructure, and a shared resilience layer. Ports, hulls, sea lanes, offshore assets, cables and the seabed are becoming too important to leave poorly observed, and too expensive to operate with crews alone.
When we first covered Ocean Tech in March 2023, the market still looked mostly like the blue economy: aquaculture, route optimization, offshore wind, shipping decarbonization and maritime SaaS. Three years later, the same broad search points somewhere sharper. None of the companies from that first edition remain in this month’s Top 10, not because they became irrelevant, but because the center of gravity has moved.
Climate and efficiency still matter. But the highest-signal companies we found are now building autonomy, sensing, robotics, mission software and maritime intelligence. This is not only about making the ocean cleaner or more efficient. It is about making it observable, autonomous and coordinated enough to support trade, energy, defence, science and climate adaptation at much larger scale.
That is why this edition tilts toward uncrewed vessels, fibre-optic sensing, autonomous hull inspection, subsea robots, ocean data and defence-grade maritime platforms. The more contrarian point may be that the future of Ocean Tech is not simply “sovereignty” in the narrow sense. It is shared intelligence over a domain that no single actor can fully own, monitor or control.
For this edition, we re-ran a broad Ocean Tech search in RAMP, covering maritime software, shipping decarbonization, hull cleaning, ocean data, underwater robotics, subsea infrastructure, offshore energy, aquaculture, seabed monitoring, ports, autonomy and dual-use maritime systems. The ranking starts with RRW Growth Scores, then applies our usual editorial lens to ensure that each company clearly fits the theme, that public data is current, and that the final list reflects the strongest strategic signals in the market.
As always, we choose the themes that intrigue us, but the ranking itself is produced by RAMP's Growth Score (momentum and leading indicators), the companies are picked by the algorithm, not by us.
RAMP's Ocean tech top10
We hope this sparks interesting conversations. If you have any comments or would like to suggest a startup that should be included, feel free to reach out to us. Joseph, Chloé and Olivier will be delighted to discuss these trends and rankings.
(Ranking established on 24/05/2026)
We’ve highlighted 4 key trends illustrated by these companies:
Defence is turning ocean tech into a full-stack systems market
The strongest change versus 2023 is the rise of defence-grade maritime systems. Around it, Kraken Technology Group builds high-performance autonomous maritime platforms, Optics11 develops fibre-optic sensing systems for underwater security and critical infrastructure, Mirai Robotics builds software-defined maritime autonomy and intelligence systems, and MAHI provides an open maritime autonomy stack for uncrewed and crewed vessels. Together, they point to a market where sensors, robotics, autonomy, software and platforms become part of maritime deterrence. The buyer backdrop is changing too: EU defence expenditure reached €343bn in 2024, with defence investment close to €106bn and equipment procurement up 39% year-on-year. Europe does not only need more ships. It needs better maritime awareness, faster deployment and systems that can operate where crewed assets are scarce.
Autonomy is moving from navigation to mission execution.
Autonomy is no longer only about whether a vessel can move by itself. The harder question is whether it can complete a job: survey, inspect, patrol, clean, monitor, intervene. ACUA Ocean, Online Oceans, MAHI and Nautica Technologies all sit in that shift. The regulatory path is also moving: the International Maritime Organization adopted its first global MASS Code, for Maritime Autonomous Surface Ships, in May 2026. It takes effect from 1 July 2026 as a non-mandatory framework, with mandatory rules expected later. The crewing constraint makes this more urgent: BIMCO and the International Chamber of Shipping forecast a need for 89,510 additional officers by 2026 to operate the world merchant fleet. Maritime operations cannot scale only by adding people.
The seabed is becoming a strategic infrastructure layer.
Subsea used to feel like a specialist engineering niche. It now sits at the intersection of connectivity, energy security, offshore maintenance and defence. Tethys Robotics, cosma, Optics11 and ScrubMarine show the investable surface expanding: robots, sensors, seabed intelligence and robotic maintenance. A close follow-up was Bubble Robotics, a French player building resident autonomous underwater robots to monitor offshore infrastructure 24/7, from cables and wind farms to ports, hulls and maritime security missions. This is not an edge case: the International Telecommunication Union reports over 170 submarine cable repairs worldwide in 2025, equivalent to more than three cable failures per week on average. NATO’s Baltic Sentry made the point visible, but the real market is broader than the Baltic. The seabed is becoming an operating layer.
Efficiency is being sold as uptime, not just carbon.
The 2023 Ocean Tech framing was heavily climate-led. That has not disappeared. The climate buyer is still real: IMO’s 2023 GHG strategy targets net-zero international shipping by or around 2050, with indicative cuts of at least 20% by 2030 and 70% by 2040 versus 2008. Hull cleaning, inspection, routing and alternative propulsion still matter because they reduce fuel burn, downtime and operational waste. Nautica Technologies, ScrubMarine, ACUA Ocean and cosma all have climate or efficiency logic. But the buyer rationale is widening: lower emissions, lower crew dependency, higher uptime, better visibility and stronger control of strategic maritime assets.
Open questions:
Can Europe scale maritime presence before new crewed or autonomous fleets arrive at scale?
Europe’s maritime defence problem is not only budget. It is capability, industrial capacity, time and trust in uncrewed systems. The open question is whether trusted autonomous systems can become operational fast enough for port security, coastal surveillance, mine countermeasures and offshore monitoring. The maritime domain awareness problem is also becoming more concrete: by December 2025, the EU said it had designated almost 600 vessels linked to Russia’s shadow fleet.
Will the ocean become part of the AI infrastructure stack?
This is outside the core ranking, but it is no longer science fiction. Panthalassa just raised $140 million for ocean-powered AI compute. Aikido is proposing floating offshore wind platforms with 10 to 12MW of onboard AI-grade compute. Shanghai’s 24MW offshore wind-powered underwater data center is already in commercial operation. Europe has offshore wind, subsea cable expertise and energy constraints, but we did not find an obvious pure-play leader in this ranking.
Does dual-use help Ocean Tech scale, or distort it?
Defence demand can fund hard engineering and validate mission-critical products. It can also pull startups into long procurement cycles, export controls, classification issues and bespoke mission specs. The best companies may be those that can serve both sides: commercial offshore operations in normal conditions, sovereign maritime resilience when the environment gets worse.
More on RAMP's scoring method
The ranking of these startups is based on the estimated momentum of the company, but the algorithm does not assess the quality or reliability of the products/solutions developed by these companies!
Find out about the algorithm behind this ranking and the way scores are calculated here: Cheat sheet on RAMP
In case you missed them, our latest top 10s are here: Agentic Commerce (April26) AI’s Picks and Shovels (March26), AI safety & governance (February26), Energy (January26), Nature & Biodiversity (December25), Digital Biology (November25), ( Women-founded startups (october25)
All the previous Top 10 are here.
Portfolio news:
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Okeiro integrated Posos’s prescription AI, bringing longitudinal patient monitoring, clinical data analysis and prescription safety into one workflow for transplant and chronic kidney disease patients.
Jiko deepened its Kyriba integration, giving treasury teams visibility into balances, transactions and underlying T-bill positions directly inside Kyriba.
Otera joined Siemens Corporate Day, selected by the European Innovation Council as part of a 14-startup cohort and working directly with Siemens teams on autonomous decision-agent use cases.
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