HAIFA, ISRAEL | Israeli maritime technology start-up HydroSight has emerged from stealth with $5 million in seed funding for an artificial intelligence platform designed to map and analyze the seabed, targeting a growing global need to monitor critical underwater infrastructure.
The Haifa-based company announced the funding Sept. 7. The round was led by StageOne Ventures, with participation from Vertex Ventures and Israelโs National Center of Blue Economy, which operates under the HiCenter Ventures investment fund.
HydroSight was founded in late 2025 by CEO Tomer Adler, Chief Technology Officer Haitham Ezzy and Chief Operating Officer Chen Megera.
Despite having a team of only five employees, the young company says its technology is already being used in projects in Israel and abroad.
Its customers and prospective customers include port authorities, energy companies and telecommunications operators responsible for infrastructure on or beneath the seabed.
The company is attempting to solve a problem that has grown alongside advances in marine-survey technology.
Sonar systems and other surveying equipment can now collect enormous quantities of detailed information about the ocean floor. Turning that raw information into an accurate and useful picture, however, can still require extensive manual analysis by specialists.
HydroSight is applying AI to automate much of that process.
AI Looks For Changes Beneath The Water
HydroSight’s platform integrates marine-survey information collected at different times and from different sources.
It then analyzes the data to automatically identify changes, anomalies, and patterns on the seabed.
Rather than treating individual surveys as isolated snapshots, the system is designed to produce an evolving picture of what is happening underwater.
That capability can be particularly valuable for infrastructure operators.
Subsea telecommunications cables, energy infrastructure, pipelines, ports and offshore installations all depend on an accurate understanding of the terrain around them.
Changes to the seabed can potentially affect how infrastructure is planned, installed, inspected and maintained.
The technology could allow an operator, for example, to compare successive marine surveys and identify a change that might otherwise require a specialist to manually examine large volumes of data.
HydroSight says the result is intended to give infrastructure owners a clearer and more current understanding of the underwater environments in which they operate.
Subsea Infrastructure Has Become Increasingly Strategic
The market HydroSight is entering extends well beyond traditional oceanographic research.
Modern economies depend heavily on infrastructure that most people never see.
International telecommunications cables cross oceans and seas, connecting countries and carrying enormous volumes of digital traffic. Offshore energy production also relies on extensive underwater infrastructure, while ports increasingly require sophisticated data to plan construction, dredging and other operations.
The importance of these systems has also made the security and resilience of subsea infrastructure an increasingly prominent international issue.
Damage to an underwater cable or other critical installation can have consequences far beyond the immediate location.
For HydroSight, that creates an opportunity to apply artificial intelligence and advanced data analysis to a physical environment where interpretation has traditionally depended heavily on specialized human expertise.
The company is not building sonar equipment itself. Its focus is on making better use of the information marine-survey systems already collect.
By combining information from multiple surveys and automatically looking for differences between them, the company hopes to make seabed monitoring faster and more useful for infrastructure owners.
Founded From Maritime Experience
HydroSight’s founders came to the problem with practical experience in maritime operations and underwater data.
Adler, Ezzy and Megera have backgrounds that include work aboard vessels and exposure to the challenges of interpreting information collected in marine environments.
The company says that experience helped them recognize a growing gap.
Surveying equipment was becoming increasingly capable of gathering large amounts of information, but interpreting and comparing that data remained complex, time-consuming, and dependent on specialist expertise.
HydroSight was created to narrow that gap.
The company established itself in Haifa, a natural location for an Israeli maritime technology venture.
Israelโs National Center of Blue Economy and Innovation is also based in Haifa and describes the city as the centre of Israelโs growing Blue Tech ecosystem.
The centre was established in 2022 and works to connect maritime technology companies with investors, industry, academia and international markets.
Israel has placed increasing emphasis on maritime innovation as the Mediterranean becomes more important to the country’s energy, trade, infrastructure and economic development.
$5 Million To Expand Technology And Commercial Operations
HydroSight plans to use its seed financing to expand its team, further develop its technology and increase commercial activity internationally.
The investment also brings together several organizations active in Israelโs technology ecosystem.
StageOne Ventures led the round, while Vertex Ventures and the National Center of Blue Economy participated.
The National Center’s involvement is particularly relevant because HydroSight sits at the intersection of two areas in which Israel has developed substantial expertise: artificial intelligence and maritime technology.
The National Center says its mandate includes investing in Blue Tech start-ups and connecting Israeli maritime innovation with global industry and investors.
HydroSight is now moving from its stealth development phase into broader commercialization.
Its challenge will be demonstrating that AI analysis can deliver meaningful improvements over established marine-survey workflows, particularly in industries where accuracy and reliability are critical.
But the underlying problem the company is targeting is growing.
As more communications, energy and industrial infrastructure extends offshore, understanding what is happening on the seabed is becoming increasingly important.
For a five-person Israeli start-up in Haifa, that largely unseen world represents a potentially significant global technology market.
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