Unmanned systems are starting to dominate yet another domain: seas and oceans. Ukraine’s navy said that in September, they recorded “the first-ever combat between unmanned surface vessels,” when their Sargan-3000 naval drone destroyed a Russian one at an undisclosed location on the Black Sea.
Adversaries can exploit the lack of defences against this new type of threat, especially underwater. Low-cost vehicles can inflict outsized harm on naval assets and civilian infrastructure, such as power plants, ports, pipelines and cables.
“With the means we have today, we can’t defend those areas,” Gauthier Bouxin told Resilience Media. This is the premise behind Pelagon, Bouxin’s startup, which has just emerged out of stealth. Pelagon builds “protection zones” for coastal and maritime facilities, which employ an AI-powered system to detect, track and eventually intercept underwater objects.
The company also announced its “inception” round, with BPI France, Seedcamp, Hexa and unnamed ‘defence entrepreneurs’ among its investors. It did not disclose the amount invested.
Bouxin is a former French navy officer, and he believes that the drastic evolution of underwater weapons has outpaced the response to them.
“The tools we have today to detect things underwater were designed to chase submarines, but not small objects,” he said. “We are totally blind in those areas.”
The difficulty in tracking movements under water, where there’s no visibility and electric waves, means that it’s a difficult domain to defend, and a perfect one for hybrid warfare and covert operations, because it’s easier to plausibly deny involvement. The Nord Stream pipeline sabotage is a case in point.
Pelagon has developed what they call an “interdiction dome,” made of four components: an acoustic sensor network, an AI model that interprets underwater acoustic signals and adapts to changing conditions, an underwater interceptor, and a software connecting them.
Despite only announcing themselves to the wider public now, Pelagon says its solution is already working and deployed by one civilian customer in the Mediterranean, where it operates “a sensing network, a data visualization system and an auto classification system without the interceptor.”
The interceptor, a component of the dome meant for military customers, is not in use yet, but it has been tested, according to Bouxin. He said that the company has to ramp up its industrial production to deliver this element of the “dome.” Pelagon wants to “test and improve (the interceptor) together with navies,” before it builds it at scale. When? “As soon as possible,” said Bouxin, without determining a specific timeline.
In his conversation with Resilience Media, Bouxin emphasised that Pelagon offers a “solution as a service,” rather than being a hardware provider. It’s the AI-powered software that lies at the heart of Pelagon’s product, which is effectively “sensor agnostic,” or able to build on hardware that customers already possess.
Reflecting on the domain of maritime unmanned systems in general, Bouxin said that “everyone is aware that it is the next big pocket,” after air, land, and command and control. It’s the latest frontier for defence tech, with lot of newfound interest from investors and customers alike.
“Almost all European economic activity relies on maritime infrastructure, global maritime trade, subsea cables conveying 99% of digital traffic, and offshore energy sites,” said Carlos Espinal, managing partner at Seedcamp, which participated in the funding round. He added that “sabotage of this infrastructure is already routine, and our defence-only systems aren’t evolving fast enough to keep up.”
On customers’ side, recent attacks against coastal targets have instilled fear and a sense of urgency among operators of critical infrastructure. Just last week, a container ship on the Black Sea was hit by three underwater drones and sank by the coast of Bulgaria.
This interest partly explains why Pelagon chose to remain in stealth for so long: “the traction is really huge,” said Bouxin. “Yesterday, I had a call with a wind farm operator in the Baltic, a Polish one. He asked: Can you come tomorrow?”
Ukraine has enjoyed remarkable success in employing unmanned naval systems in its maritime theater on the Black Sea. According to the Ukrainian think-tank Serpens Center, Ukraine, “lacking a traditional fleet, forced the Russian Navy into retreat.” That also proves how quickly these frontier technologies can become a threat, even in hands of actors previously inexperienced in naval warfare. This is why the Serpens Center report suggests that “Counter-USV and integrated littoral defense should become priority R&D areas for NATO and partner navies.”
