ELWAVE advancing its “electric sense” tech for subsea drones

ELWAVE, an industrial designer and manufacturer of electromagnetics sensors for the underwater and industrial robotics, has completed its first capital raise.

The funds will support the company’s global growth ambition, industrialisation and commercialisation of its first products for underwater robotics.

The funding round was led by SOFIMAC Innovation with co-investors Litto Invest Fund and Atlantique Vendée Innovation Fund. Bpifrance and banks have completed this capital raise with other financial supports.

This equity financing comes as ELWAVE scales to meet strong demand in the underwater robotics, especially for offshore wind market and underwater autonomous vehicles (AUVs).

ELWAVE, founded in 2018 aims to valorise more than 10 years of top-level academic research on the “electric sense” technology from the Biorobotic Laboratory of Institut Mines Telecom Atlantique.

Electric sense (or active electrolocation) is an electromagnetic perception mode used by tropical fishes living in muddy and cluttered waters in which vision and acoustic perception are inefficient.

Based on this biomimetics approach, ELWAVE solution is the only one to provide a real-time 360 degrees perception for underwater and industrial robots, either remotely piloted and autonomous ones.

ELWAVE technology can detect, locate and characterize any type of objects in simple and complex environments. The company is especially completing a solution for the tracking of buried objects in underwater sediments such as cables, pipelines or mines.

ELWAVE currently works with leading underwater robotics companies such as Total, Saipem, Subsea 7, IXBLUE, Naval Group and others for the development of its solutions and their implementation on client’s vehicles.

Shallow water applications, such as offshore wind cables inspection, UXO detection and ROV/AUV navigation are first targeted.