Despite the fact that water covers 71% of the Earth, there is still so much we don’t know about the ocean floor and today’s founder is looking to change that. Joe Wolfel is the co-founder and CEO of Terradepth (https://www.terradepth.com/) , the company that is working towards increasing ocean knowledge through autonomous, high resolution, scalable data collection in the deep ocean. On this week’s episode of Found, Becca is joined by guest co-host, Tim De Chant to discuss why mapping geological features at the bottom of the ocean isn’t just something worth doing for curiosity’s sake, it’s important to a variety of players from companies looking to install offshore wind farms to the Navy. They also get into who is buying this kind of data (https://techcrunch.com/2022/04/11/terradepth-raises-another-20-million-to-map-the-ocean-floor-with-robots/) , how Wolfel’s experience as a Navy Seal prepared him for entrepreneurship, and the trend of deeptech founders needing to find revenue streams early on as they’re developing their technology.
(0:00) Introduction
(2:07) Robotics role in mapping the ocean
(8:49) Scaling maritime data collection
(15:47) Fundraising challenges for hardware companies
(21:57) Transitioning from Navy to entrepreneurship
(24:13) Data-driven decision making
(29:43) Finding the right customer base
(35:14) Host discussion
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