Our investment in Hullbot

Folklore is delighted to announce our investment in Hullbot’s A$16M Series A, alongside Regeneration VC, Trinity Ventures, Katapult Ocean and others.

Founded in Sydney, Hullbot designs, builds, and deploys autonomous underwater robots that proactively clean and inspect ship hulls. With organic traction from some of the world's largest shipping providers around the world, Hullbot technology offers optimisation for much of the 80%+ of global trade transported by sea. This leads to reduced carbon emissions caused by ship ‘drag’ - increasing operational efficiency, performance and ensuring proactive regulatory compliance. By enabling proactive and frequent hull maintenance, Hullbot delivers customers validated fuel savings of 10 - 26%.

With a background in mechanical engineering and ship building, Tom Loefler, founder and CEO of Hullbot (pictured above), is uniquely placed to understand customer pain points and lead this highly technical team of world leading mariners, roboticists, and software engineers. This excellent team has the right chops to address this unsolved problem.

Hullbot is the perfect example of world class Australian innovation tackling a niche problem ripe for optimisation. With more than 3% of global emissions coming from shipping; Hullbot’s autonomous hull cleaning robots, which incorporate AI and sensor fusion, offer the shipping industry immediate reductions in fuel consumption, the highest consumable cost in shipping, from proactive cleaning and maintenance of ship hulls.

Shipping accounts for around 1 billion tonnes of CO₂ emissions every year, and even a thin layer of biofouling (marine organisms on vessel hulls) on a ship’s hull can drive fuel overconsumption by more than 20%.

With the technology and knowledge for automated hull maintenance previously unavailable, many vessel operators lacked real time data to proactively manage hull condition and vessel performance. Hullbot’s proprietary technology replaces the difficult and dangerous job of manual diving and scraping, which is generally done only once a year. Hullbot’s technology is also able to identify maintenance issues under water which are otherwise very difficult to detect.

While some startups have tried to solve this problem historically, Hullbot stands unique with its business model (cleaning as a service versus pay per clean), its unique and patented technology and its unique market strategy, which has already seen success.

Hullbot’s unique technology, built on advanced underwater camera-based autonomy and new sensors, allows for self-deploying platforms to autonomously inspect and interact with submerged hulls. This helps fleets cut operational costs while preventing pollution and reducing emissions. Hullbot’s service has already cleaned over 82 vessels across the US, EU, and APAC, preventing over 4,000,000 kg of CO₂ emissions.

Hullbot has already completed over 1000 cleans globally, across ferry, commercial shipping and fishing operations. Customers include Sydney's own Sydney Ferries. Currently, Hullbot has established operations in the US, Mexico, Europe, Singapore and local markets.

With demand for proactive hull cleaning rapidly increasing, Hullbot is now entering a major growth phase. The company has been growing revenues and ships under management very quickly, and has not lost a customer to date. The company plans to use the proceeds of this raise to scale manufacturing, strengthen its global service network, and expand its next-generation robotic systems to accommodate larger vessel classes, positioning Hullbot as a key player in delivery of efficiency gains in shipping, and the decarbonisation transition of the shipping industry.