Despite covering over 70% of our planet, the oceans and seas remain largely unmapped and poorly understood. Collecting useable data about the oceans is hard and expensive--reliant on specialized costly vessels, old-school technologies, and plenty of labour.

The comparison to land mapping technologies (like Google Earth) is stark--we have near-total visibility of land-based infrastructure, continuously updated, and collected by satellite. Subsea infrastructure, like pipelines and cables, are managed with minimal, outdated, and isolated datasets.

This gap in oceanic intelligence is an increasing problem.  We're constantly adding new subsea infrastructure—cables, pipelines, risers, platforms—to support oil and gas, power, telecoms, mining, and military operations. At the same time, owners and operators are sailing blind, relying on static years-old surveys.

And sea floors are pretty dynamic, subject to tides, currents, and human activity. You can really appreciate the mounting financial and operational risks—from infrastructure damage to safety concerns to project delays.

Enter Terradepth, a data-as-a-service company that is bringing Silicon Valley smarts to subsea intelligence. In this episode, I speak with COO Kris Rydberg on how they’re using autonomous vehicles and cloud infrastructure to drastically cut the cost of ocean data acquisition. The best part is how ocean data is now subscription-based, with high reusability across industries. This model reduces capital risk, improves predictive decision-making, and promotes multi-sector collaboration. 

👤 About the Guest:

Kris Rydberg -- Chief Operating Officer, Terradepth

Kris Rydberg is a seasoned executive with three decades of leadership in tech-driven operational strategy. He’s helped scale startups, transform Fortune 500 divisions, and consult on industrial IoT, edge computing, and platform technologies. Kris brings a rare blend of deep tech fluency and cross-sector business acumen. He holds two U.S. patents and an MBA from Syracuse University.

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The views expressed in this podcast are my own and do not constitute professional advice.