Andrenam Secures $10M to Develop First AI-Powered Maritime Sensing Network
Hydrophones, used to detect enemy submarines for over a century, are getting a high-tech upgrade. Andrenam, a startup utilizing AI to analyze sonar data, aims to enhance this legacy defense tool with real-time insights.
Despite decades of sonar use, much of the data processing remains manual and analog. "It's been people in these shacks that have headphones on, looking at a fuzzy screen and analyzing data coming to them in mass," said Matej Cernosek, the startup's cofounder and CEO. "Our vision is to secure the oceans. We're doing that by building a distributed sensing network - a sonar mesh.”
Andrenam's $10 million seed round closed in 36 hours. Its quick fundraise indicates significant investor interest in new defense technology. First Round Capital led the round with participation from Also Capital, Long Journey, Homebrew, and the Colorado School of Mines Venture Fund, among others.
In 2024, Cernosek, a former SpaceX engineer, founded the Hawthorne, California-based company with Alex Chu, Andrenam's CTO. The founders met during their first week of college at the Colorado School of Mines, where they studied mechanical engineering.
Andrenam's eight-person team, which includes former engineers from SpaceX and defense tech companies Palantir, Anduril, and Saronic, is developing machine-learning-powered software designed to process underwater acoustic data and piece together what's happening in real time. The startup has been buying hydrophones off the shelf and pairing them with its software, but aims to build its own buoys equipped with its technology to reduce costs and gather more training data for its algorithms.
"We really want to vertically integrate the solution," Cernosek said. "A lot of our competitors are just integrators - they take all these parts from everywhere, patch them together. It works, but it ends up being a bespoke system that's expensive."
After seeing Andrenam's pitch deck, Meka Asonye, a partner at First Round Capital, flew from San Francisco to Hawthorne to meet the team that same weekend. "Naturally, we're a startup - we were working," Cernosek said, so they took the Saturday meeting. They had another call with First Round that Monday and received a term sheet that night. "Oftentimes these early-stage companies are drawing things on a napkin, and they're years away from being ready," Asonye said. "The Andrenam team is actually deploying stuff off the coast of California, and the technology already works." Asonye was also interested in the company's potential commercial applications, such as port security.
Andrenam plans to use the seed funding to double its headcount to 16 employees, focusing on hiring software engineers. The company also bought a boat with the funding to start assembling the hardware it hopes to build. "If you want to be the forward-deployed engineer here and go on the boat with us and deploy these systems and train them, this is your opportunity," Cernosek said. "You can sit in a cubicle, but do you want to?"
Cernosek's drive to build a national security startup comes from his personal background. His family immigrated to the US from the Czech Republic during communist rule, which shaped his worldview. "We live in a country that has done very well for my family - my parents came here with $60 in their pocket," he said. "I want to build a generational company that will have a significant impact."