Andrenam, A SpaceX Alumni-Founded Startup, Raises $10 Million in 36 Hours

Andrenam, a startup that uses AI to analyze sonar data from undersea environments, said Monday it raised $10 million in a seed round.

The seed round, which was led by First Round Capital with participation from Also Capital, Long Journey, Homebrew, the Colorado School of Mines Venture Fund, and others, closed in just 36 hours. The speed at which the venture raised the money proves just how excited tech leaders are about this new form of defensive innovation, Business Insider says.

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Andrenam was founded in 2024 by Matej Cernosek, a former SpaceX engineer, and Alex Chu, a former software engineer at real estate platform Qualia. “Our vision is to secure the oceans. We’re doing that by building a distributed sensing network — a sonar mesh,” Cernosek told Business Insider.

Sonar equipment has long been used to map the ocean and maritime threats, but thus far, the data processing has been done manually. “It’s been people in these shacks that have headphones on, looking at a fuzzy screen and analyzing data coming to them in mass,” Cernosek told Business Insider. “We really want to vertically integrate the solution.”

Up to this point, Andrenam has been purchasing existing hydrophones and pairing them with its new software. However, its ultimate goal is to build its own buoys equipped with its unique technology, which will help lower costs.

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To do this, the company intends to grow its current eight-person team, comprised of engineers from SpaceX, Palantir (NASDAQ:PLTR), Anduril, and Saronic, into a 16-person unit. More manpower will allow it to develop the machine-learning-powered software more quickly.

Meka Asonye, a partner at First Round Capital, told Business Insider that after seeing Andrenam’s pitch deck, he hopped on a flight to meet with the team that same weekend. “Oftentimes these early-stage companies are drawing things on a napkin, and they’re years and years away from being ready,” he said. “The Andrenam team is actually deploying stuff off the coast of California, and the technology already works.”

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Investors like Asonye are drawn to defense tech companies like Andrenam that have potential for both private and public sector customers, Business Insider said.

For Cernosek, the motivation to build a defense tech company is much more personal. His family immigrated from former Czechoslovakia during communist rule, finding a better life in the U.S. “We live in the best country in the world, and this country 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 massive impact for the United States.”

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