AndrenaM, a startup that makes software for analyzing sonar data raised $10 million in a seed funding round that closed in 36 hours — a feat that typically takes weeks or months for early-stage startups.
First Round Capital led the fundraise, with participation from Also Capital, Long Journey, Homebrew, and the Colorado School of Mines Venture Fund, among others.
Underwater microphones, called hydrophones, spot enemy submarines and have been around for over a century, and AndrenaM plans to give these tools an upgrade by using artificial intelligence to analyze sonar data and deliver real-time insights.
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“Our vision is to secure the oceans,” Matej Cernosek, the startup’s co-founder and CEO, told Business Insider in an interview. “We’re doing that by building a distributed sensing network — a sonar mesh.”
Cernosek, who is a former SpaceX engineer founded the startup in 2024, with Alex Chu, who is the chief technology officer. Chu previously worked at a robotics company and as a software engineer at Qualia, a real estate platform.
According to AndrenaM, much of the data processing, particularly in sonar use, is still manual and analog. “It’s been people in these shacks that have headphones on, looking at a fuzzy screen and analyzing data coming to them in mass,” Cernosek said. AndrenaM is trying to revolutionize this, with its AI-powered, distributed maritime sensing network for persistent autonomous awareness from surface to seabed.
AndrenaM’s eight-person team includes former engineers from SpaceX and the defense tech giants Palantir, Anduril, and Saronic. The team is developing machine-learning-powered software designed to process underwater acoustic data and piece together what’s happening in real time.
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While the startup has been buying hydrophones off the shelf and pairing them with its software so far, the team wants to build its own buoys equipped with its tech, which would lower costs and help the team gather more training data for its algorithms. “We really want to vertically integrate the solution,” Cernosek said. “A lot of our competitors are just integrators — they take all these parts from everywhere, patch them together with Band-Aids. It works, but it ends up being a bespoke system that’s super expensive.”
Meka Asonye, a partner at First Round Capital, flew from San Francisco to Hawthorne the same weekend after he saw AndrenaM’s pitch deck. “Oftentimes these early-stage companies are drawing things on a napkin, and they’re years and years away from being ready,” Asonye told BI. “The AndrenaM team is actually deploying stuff off the coast of California, and the technology already works.”
Asonye was also drawn to the company because of its potential use cases such as port security. Defense tech investors and the Pentagon are increasingly interested in startups that can serve both public and private sector customers. Last week, the Department of Defense (DOD) tapped nuclear startup Oklo to deploy its emerging nuclear reactor technology at the Eielson Air Force Base in Alaska.
AndrenaM plans to use the funds raised to double its head count to 16 employees, focusing on hiring software engineers. The company also bought a boat with the funding to start assembling the hardware it hopes to build, Cernosek said.