Focused on Developing Combined Services with Cost-Efficient and Environmentally Friendly Maintenance of End Customers’ Subsea Infrastructure

Nauticus Robotics a Houston-area developer of offshore subsea and surface robots and autonomy software, and Wood PLC (“Wood”), a global leader in consulting and engineering across energy and the built environment, have entered into a strategic relationship.

The Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) formalizes the relationship between Nauticus and Wood at the strategic and working level, focusing on the development of an integrated service offering to provide more cost-efficient and environmentally friendly maintenance of the end customers’ subsea infrastructures.

According to an October 2021 report published by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, the ocean economy is a $2.5 trillion a year marketplace and only expected to grow. Nauticus and Wood have a shared objective: increase the value creation for their common customers within that marketplace. Wood’s domain knowledge of offshore assets is unparalleled, and it has developed and validated data gathering methods that are orders of magnitude more efficient than conventional methods.

“This is a great example of the offshore digitization effort and novel use of emerging offshore robotics. Combining these two innovations make perfect sense,” said Todd Newell, SVP of Business Development at Nauticus. “It will be exciting to see the benefits and value this partnership yields for our customers.”

“Our team sees the opportunity to influence the full life cycle cost for both conventional and renewable offshore marine assets,” said Matt Kirk, SVP Specialist Engineering & Consulting at Wood. “To unlock these possibilities for our customers, we need step change technologies combined with deep domain engineering expertise. Wood is delighted to be working with a company such as Nauticus who is challenging convention and driving real innovation into the subsea autonomous solutions market.”

Nauticus’ long-term ambition is to replace the legacy and large human-operated ships that deploy other submersible vehicles with its own fleet of green subsea and surface ocean-going robots. Its tandem robots includes Hydronaut, a small, optionally crewed vessel operating on the surface, and Aquanaut, the world’s first tetherless underwater robot that deploys robust and complex decision making, which can collect data and interact with the offshore environment without any personnel required nearby. The disruptive product offering is intended to provide viable alternatives to incumbent systems within industries such as offshore renewables, oil and gas, government, and aquaculture, all of which are burdened by substantial environmental and economic tradeoffs in their present states.

On December 16, 2021, Nauticus and CleanTech Acquisition Corp. (NASDAQ: CLAQ), a special purpose acquisition corporation, entered into a definitive business combination agreement that would result in Nauticus becoming a public company.