Former SpaceX engineer founds AI startup to combat enemy submarines – and raises $10 million in record time

Underwater microphones—so-called hydrophones—have been used to locate enemy submarines for nearly a century. This proven defense tool is now receiving a high-tech upgrade with AndrenaM, a startup that uses artificial intelligence to analyze sonar data and provide real-time insights.

"Our vision is to secure the oceans," said Matej Cernosek, co-founder and CEO of AndrenaM, in an interview with us. "We're achieving this by building a distributed sensor network—a sonar mesh."

AndrenaM's $10 million (approximately €8.6 million) funding round was completed in just 36 hours. This process typically takes weeks or even months for early-stage startups. The rapid capital raise demonstrates the strong investor interest in this new wave of defense technology.

First Round Capital initiated the financing round with participation from Also Capital, Long Journey, Homebrew and the Venture Fund of the Colorado School of Mines, among others.

In 2024, Cernosek, a former SpaceX engineer, founded the Hawthorne, California-based company with co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Alex Chu.

The two met during their first week of college at the Colorado School of Mines, where they both studied mechanical engineering. Chu previously worked at a robotics company and as a software developer at Qualia, a real estate platform.

Despite decades of using sonar technology, much of the data processing is still done manually and analogically. "People sit in small booths with headphones, staring at blurry screens and analyzing massive amounts of data," Cernosek said.

AndrenaM's eight-person team, which includes former engineers from SpaceX and defense technology giants Palantir, Anduril, and Saronic, is developing machine learning-based software that processes underwater acoustic data and creates a complete picture of the situation in real time.

So far, the startup has purchased commercially available hydrophones and combined them with its software. But the team plans to build its own buoys with integrated technology . This should reduce costs while providing more training data for the algorithms.

"We really want to vertically integrate the solution," said Cernosek. "Many of our competitors are just integrators—they take all sorts of components from everywhere and patch them together somehow. That works, but results in customized systems that are extremely expensive."

After seeing AndrenaM's pitch deck, Meka Asonye, ​​a partner at First Round Capital and a pilot himself, hopped on a plane and flew from San Francisco to Hawthorne that same weekend to meet the team in person.

The meeting took place on Saturday. The following Monday, they had another meeting with First Round, and they received a term sheet that same evening.

"Often, these early-stage startups are still drawing things on a napkin and are years away from being market-ready," said Asonye. "The AndrenaM team is actually already deploying its technology off the coast of California—and it's already working."

Asonye was also impressed by the company's commercial potential, for example in port security. Defense technology investors and the Pentagon are increasingly interested in startups that can serve both government and private customers.

AndrenaM plans to use the seed funding to double its workforce from eight to sixteen, with a focus on hiring software developers. The company also used the capital to purchase a boat to begin building its own hardware, Cernosek said.

AndrenaM

Much of Cernosek's motivation to found a national security startup stems from his personal background. His family emigrated from the Czech Republic to the United States during communist rule—an experience that shaped his worldview.

"We live in the best country in the world, and this country has given so much to my family—my parents came here with $60 in their pockets," he said. "I want to build a company that will last for generations and have a tremendous impact on the United States."