FORSSEA ROBOTICS successfully raises €2.4M to fund its subsea vehicle qualifications

14.09.2018


Offshore robotics startup FORSSEA ROBOTICS announced today an investment of €2.4M led by the French VC firm IRDI-SORIDEC with additional funds coming from the family office SOPER and a team of international energy investors.

Part of the total funding came from the winning of several national innovation grants including the “Ship of the Future” program managed by the French Energy Agency (ADEME) and the I-Lab competition organized by the French public investment bank (BPI). This is FORSSEA’s second successful fundraising as the company already raised €500k in 2016.

The new funds will enable FORSSEA to undertake and complete sea qualifications of its Atoll vehicle during the summer of 2019.

“Gautier Dreyfus and Maxime Cerramon, the founding shareholders of FORRSEA ROBOTICS, know their business extremely well and have complementary skills and experience” said Julien Sainte-Catherine, Investment Director at IRDI-SORIDEC. “In just a short couple of months, they have succeeded in building an outstanding environment around their project as FORSSEA develops clear and innovative technical solutions. The 2014-2017 oil crisis made the offshore industry realize this was the right time for change. We believe FORSSEA’s time to market is excellent”.

Atoll, an autonomous docking ROV
FORSSEA has recently developed its first subsea vehicle for autonomous docking applications. The vehicle, named ATOLL, acts as a homing device to lead a subsea cable down to an infrastructure on the seabed at water depths of up to 2,000 meters. Because the ATOLL can be deployed from a very light vessel, the system will enable reductions in operating costs of certain subsea interventions. ATOLL’s applications range from light structure lifting (such as LBL frame deployments) to power/data transfer with resident systems.

“This funding will enable us to qualify our proprietary designed ATOLL vehicle as well as state-of-the-art underwater vision systems. We will undertake several trial sessions in October 2018 in shallow water, whereas the full depth equipment will be assembled early 2019 for deep water trials mid-year. Working offshore is a real challenge and this successful fund raising is an important milestone underpinning our ambition”, said Gautier Dreyfus, co-founder and CEO at FORSSEA.

About FORSSEA ROBOTICS
FORSSEA was launched in May 2016 to develop innovative technology to reduce subsea operating costs in the offshore niche markets. FORRSEA has a non-exclusive strategic alliance SEAROV OFFSHORE (now part of DEEPOCEAN GROUP) which operates underwater vehicles (ROV) in West Africa and South-East Asia. Through its specialized research and development team currently comprising 12 professionals, FORSSEA focuses on embedded hardware with high computing capacity and innovative control algorithms. FORSSEA also develops subsea vision products that have already been successfully launched in the market including a high performance underwater photogrammetric camera with relative positioning capability.

Proof that FORSSEA is under the spotlight, the startup was awarded last April in Milan during the MCE Deepwater Development conference. Moreover, the American magazine Marine technology Review recently selected FORSSEA as one of the top 5 to watch in 2019 as part as the top 100 world underwater companies.

For more information on Irdi Soridec Gestion: https://www.irdisoridec.fr





Location: Paris, France









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