Investors throw $740,000 into Abyss

Abyss Solutions, a robotics technology developer that emerged out of Sydney University, has raised A$1m ($740,000) in funding from investors including VC fund Follow the Seed, the Financial Review reported yesterday.

Remaining investors were not named. Existing shareholders include Muru-D, the startup accelerator of telecoms firm Telstra from which Abyss graduated in 2016.

Abyss Solutions has developed sensors with fault detection algorithms that can be attached to aquatic drones to detect damage to underwater infrastructure. The company claims its technology is able to identify issues sooner than scuba-diving engineers would.

The technology is based on research undertaken at Sydney University’s Australian Center for Field Robotics.

The funding will be used to hire more engineers with a view of driving international expansion efforts. The company also hopes to offer seabed mapping technology by combining visual data with sonar signals.

Abyss said its technology would have prevented the Oroville dam crisis in California this past February, which forced 180,000 people to evacuate when cracks in the spillway were found after having gone undetected since 2013.

Masood Naqshbandi, co-founder and chief operating officer of Abyss Solutions, said: “For seabed work we will also need our ROVs [remotely operated underwater vehicles] to be untethered and completely automated, so they can go off and do their thing over very wide areas. We are investing toward that.”