Online Oceans is a UK maritime robotics company headquartered in Christchurch, Dorset, that designs, builds and operates Scout — a 2.4 m, 80 kg solar-electric uncrewed surface vehicle (USV) purpose-built for persistent ocean data collection. Scout can hold station or transit for months at a time, streaming surface and subsurface data back via Iridium and Starlink satellite links to secure cloud dashboards or APIs. At £40,000 per unit, the company positions Scout as roughly 200× more cost-effective than crewed research vessel time, making continuous ocean sensing commercially viable for the first time.

Scout is offered in five payload configurations — Adapt (BYOS open bay), Detect (acoustic and optical maritime domain awareness), Connect (subsea data harvesting and subsea asset tracking), Metocean (wave, wind and SST sensing), and Hydrotwin (AI hydrophone system for vessel and marine mammal detection). Alongside the hardware, Online Oceans sells Tether, a browser-based command-and-control platform for mission planning, real-time telemetry and swarm control, and Tether Bridge, which extends the platform to third-party MAVLink vehicles. Revenue models include outright hardware purchase and ocean data-as-a-service subscriptions.

Customers include the Royal Navy, NATO, Ocean Infinity and Sonardyne, spanning defence and maritime security, offshore wind compliance, subsea cable and pipeline protection, and scientific ocean observation. In February 2025, Online Oceans was awarded a $1.3 M research contract from the UK Advanced Research + Invention Agency (ARIA) for a joint 'Connecting Subsea to Satellites' project with Sofar Ocean. In April 2026 Sofar launched Spotter Scout — a co-developed product pairing Online Oceans' USV with Sofar's sensing and data platform. The company raised a £4 M Seed round in April 2026 led by Seraphim Space, and has a team of approximately 17 people in Christchurch, Dorset.