Pelagon emerges from stealth bringing Physical AI to defend critical maritime infrastructure

Pelagon, a European company bringing physical AI to the maritime domain, today emerges from stealth and announces its inception round. The company designs, deploys and operates protection zones around critical maritime infrastructure: from commercial ports to offshore energy sites, subsea cables and naval bases. Each zone combines surveillance, threat verification and underwater interception. Pelagon is serving both navies from European and Allied nations, and civilian operators, offering deployment, operations and maintenance as a managed service.

The round brings together Bpifrance, Elaia, Seedcamp and Hexa, alongside defence entrepreneurs, families from the European defence industry and AI researchers from leading labs, including FAIR and OpenAI.

In December 2025, Ukraine's SBU underwater drones struck a Russian submarine moored at the Novorossiysk naval base. For decades, underwater warfare meant chasing Russian and Chinese submarines across the world's oceans, and anti-submarine warfare was the preserve of a handful of navies. A new category of threat has emerged and navies have no answer. Maritime drones (surface and underwater) are now within reach of any state or armed group. Ports, naval bases, subsea cables and offshore energy sites are exposed. In Ukraine, aerial drones (FPV, Shahed) have changed the face of the war; the same shift is now happening at sea. Ports, subsea cables and offshore energy sites are increasingly exposed, including to sabotage and interference along cable routes, at landfalls and around installations.

The maritime domain is unlike any other and a total blind spot for governments and private enterprises. Radio signals, including GPS, barely penetrate seawater, leaving acoustic waves as one of the few ways to sense and communicate underwater. Salt water wears down hardware, and changing conditions can defeat AI models trained elsewhere. In coastal waters, sound reflects off the surface and the seabed; in ports, intense underwater noise and dense traffic make threats hard to identify. Protecting these sites calls for a new generation of technology, distinct from the sonar systems designed for the open ocean.

Pelagon was founded on one conviction: protecting what lies at sea takes detection and response working together. The company calls this combination interdiction. An underwater drone moving at walking pace can leave only minutes between the first alarm and impact. Infrastructure operators and navies need systems that can detect, identify and respond within that window.