Online Oceans Robotics Limited
UK startup building Scout, a 2.4 m, 80 kg solar-electric USV that stays at sea for months, plus Tether fleet C2 software; it also built Sofar's Spotter Scout.
Online Oceans Robotics Limited, trading as Online Oceans, is a UK ocean robotics company that designs, builds and operates Scout, a small solar-electric uncrewed surface vehicle (USV) for persistent ocean data collection and maritime surveillance. The company was founded in November 2023 by George Morton (co-founder and CEO, previously at ExxonMobil and Ocean Infinity) and Alistair Douglas, and is registered in England and Wales under company number 15290665 with a registered office in London. Its team and open engineering roles are based in Christchurch, Dorset. The company states that it is Cyber Essentials certified.
Scout is 2.4 m long and weighs 80 kg. It is solar-electric with no fuel, self-righting under all conditions, operates in sea state 6 and is designed to survive sea state 8 and above. It communicates over both Iridium and Starlink satellite links, uses onboard AIS for autonomous collision avoidance, and fits in the back of a van so that one person can launch it from a beach, slipway or small boat. In station-keeping mode it acts as a virtual anchor, drifting within a set radius and motoring back to centre to save power; it can also run waypoint transits or act as a surface relay for subsea assets. Online Oceans quotes deployments of six months or more between services, limited mainly by biofouling, and a purchase price from 40,000 pounds, or data-as-a-service with managed deployments and data delivered to the customer's cloud.
Scout is offered in five payload configurations: Scout Adapt (open bay with 24 V power and Ethernet for third-party sensors); Scout Detect (towed, tetrahedral or single-element acoustic arrays, a 360-degree 1080p camera, local AIS/VHF/RF capture and dark-vessel detection, with a quoted 5 km vessel detection radius); Scout Connect (acoustic modem to harvest data from seabed instruments and track AUVs and gliders, acting as a subsea-to-satellite gateway); Scout Metocean (wave height, period and direction, wind, sea surface temperature and pressure, with a Bristlemouth-compatible expansion port); and Scout Hydrotwin (integrated hydrophones with real-time AI detection of vessels and marine mammals, developed with Hydrotwin).
The company's Tether software is a browser-based command-and-control system that runs the Scout fleet and is also sold to other USV builders. It provides mission planning with bathymetric charts, global and local AIS, weather and tide layers, real-time telemetry, manual takeover from a phone or laptop, and swarm behaviours named Picket, Convoy and Cover. Tether Bridge is the matching hardware box, connected by a single power-and-Ethernet cable, that links any MAVLink autopilot (ArduPilot or PX4) to Tether over Iridium and Starlink. Tether is available hosted, white-label or on-premises, including air-gapped defence networks.
Sofar Ocean's Spotter Scout, a solar-powered USV launched by Sofar in April 2026 to carry its Spotter metocean platform into deep water, was built by Online Oceans. Online Oceans' own case studies describe a 40-day offshore deployment carrying Sofar metocean sensors and a NATO maritime unmanned systems exercise in which several hydrophone-equipped Scouts worked as a swarm to detect and track AUVs for anti-submarine warfare. Organisations listed on its website as users or partners include ARIA, BlueOasis, Ocean Infinity, Applied Ocean Sciences, Sofar, SensorTech Canada, Sonardyne, Xylem, NATO and the Royal Navy.
In April 2026, shortly after a public launch event for Scout at the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton, Online Oceans announced a 4 million pound funding round led by Seraphim Space, with participation from SolarCity co-founder Peter Rive, Quantum Systems founders Florian Seibel and Frank Thieser, and Koro Capital, to scale manufacturing and deployments. Target applications include offshore metocean and wind-farm monitoring, oil and gas infrastructure monitoring, maritime domain awareness and dark-ship detection, anti-submarine warfare, subsea cable protection, illegal fishing enforcement, marine mammal monitoring and oceanographic research.
Primary type & automation activities this supplier delivers:
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Contact Online Oceans Robotics Limited
WEBSITE
https://onlineoceans.com/HEADQUARTERS
United Kingdom
Company Facts
Founded
2023
Primary Role
Manufacturer
Company Size
-
Primary Region
Europe
Annual Sales
-
Funding Stage
Early-Stage VC
Funding Total
-
Certifications & Memberships
Keywords
- Online Oceans Robotics Limited
- Scout USV
- solar-electric surface vehicle
- persistent ocean monitoring
- metocean data
- Tether C2
- Tether Bridge
- maritime domain awareness
- passive acoustic monitoring
- ocean data as a service
- subsea data harvesting
- Manufacturer
- Software/Algorithm
- RaaS
- Unmanned Marine Vehicle
- Control & Software
- USV
- Defense & Security
- Oil
- Gas & Energy
