Verlume

Verlume is a Scottish developer and manufacturer of seabed battery systems and intelligent energy management for offshore and subsea assets. The company was founded in Aberdeen in 2013 as EC-OG and adopted the Verlume name by early 2022. Its operations facility is at Thainstone, Inverurie, and its LinkedIn page lists 11-50 employees. Co-founder Richard Knox, previously with GE Oil & Gas, serves as Chief Technology Officer.

EC-OG started with the Subsea Power Hub, a tidal turbine with integrated energy storage that was tested at Newcastle University with Scottish Enterprise support and then trialled at the EMEC test site in Orkney. The company later shifted its focus to subsea battery storage and system integration and developed Halo, which it launched commercially at Subsea Expo in Aberdeen. The first commercial Halo order came from the United States for an underwater surveillance application.

The product family is built around Axonn, an energy management system made up of modular firmware, software and hardware. Axonn controls power flow from intermittent sources into storage and out to multiple subsea loads, and it provides health monitoring, state-of-charge reporting, a communications gateway and energy modelling. Charge is a rechargeable seabed battery unit in small, medium and large configurations (35 and 55 kWh units are quoted), built with Kraken Robotics' SeaPower pressure-tolerant lithium-ion modules, which are rated at up to 260 Wh/l and 145 Wh/kg. Halo is a patented, modular seabed power delivery system rated from 100 kWh to MWh scale, with Axonn integrated, AC or DC output and in-situ recharging. Orah is the very large, multi-MWh tier. Charge and Halo are rated to 3,000 m or more, and every battery unit is pressure-tested to full operating depth. Verlume also designs and manufactures bespoke battery systems, covering cell selection, electronics, containment and qualification testing in-house.

Verlume's main link to marine robotics is power for vehicle residency. Halo can be supplied as a standalone structure or built into an AUV or ROV docking garage. In that role it provides repeated charge cycles for the vehicle, buffers renewable input so the vehicle can fast-charge, and powers subsea data processing and transmission to the surface. In the Renewables for Subsea Power (RSP) pilot off Orkney, run through the Net Zero Technology Centre with Shell, TotalEnergies, Harbour Energy, Serica Energy and PTTEP and with Baker Hughes, Mocean and Transmark Subsea as technology partners, Halo was paired with a wave energy converter and ran for more than 12 months. The installation included a resident AUV charging and communications station. Verlume also supplied the underwater charging system and battery management for the RoboFish consortium, a modular biomimetic AUV project with the Universities of York and Strathclyde, PicSea, the Supergen ORE Hub and the Offshore Renewable Energy Catapult.

Other reference projects include a Halo system for a US ocean power company's autonomous offshore power system demonstrated off Hawaii during RIMPAC, and a Charge deployment for a Canadian operator that needed temporary insulation-resistance protection for subsea umbilicals in the North Atlantic. A Charge unit fitted to a customer skid powered an environmental monitoring system in the Gulf of Mexico in 2024. For offshore wind, Verlume has a contract with RWE for the OranjeWind project in the Dutch North Sea. In October 2026 a 10-tonne enclosure for the 500 kWh Orah system destined for OranjeWind completed hyperbaric testing at JFD's facility in Aberdeen. In September 2026 Verlume signed a memorandum of understanding with SubCtech on integrated subsea power solutions.

Verlume works under a quality management system certified to ISO 9001:2015, ISO 14001:2015 and ISO 45001:2018. In February 2022 it closed an oversubscribed GBP 2.5 million round led by Par Equity, with Orchard Ventures and Scottish Enterprise taking part. In April 2023 the Scottish National Investment Bank invested GBP 6.6 million, alongside a further GBP 0.6 million from existing investors. Its awards include Company of the Year at the Global Underwater Hub Awards and the Scottish Renewables Outstanding SME award.