Portland's Bluesonde Closes $1.74M Round to Scale Water-Monitoring Buoys

Bluesonde Technologies, a Portland water-monitoring startup, has secured $1.74 million in new funding to scale production, expand deployments and grow its workforce. The company builds compact buoys that stream real-time water-quality data to a cloud platform.

CEO and co-founder Andrew Thompson said Bluesonde has already deployed more than 40 monitoring buoys this year across Maine and several other states. The company is on track to hit 50 units by year-end and roughly 200 systems in 2027.

"Our goal is to make continuous monitoring simple and affordable enough to deploy at a much larger scale, creating a high-resolution, real-time picture of how our waters are changing and giving the people who depend on them better information to make decisions," Thompson said.

Who is behind Bluesonde?

Thompson launched Bluesonde in 2024 after a decade at SpaceX, where he led engineering on Falcon 9 recovery hardware and Starlink satellite deployments. He later joined Running Tide, a Portland-based ocean health and carbon-removal startup that shut down in 2024.

He started Bluesonde in his basement with three partners:

• John Williams, who leads mechanical engineering and operations
• Tim Dyson, who leads electrical engineering and technology
• Ben Mallett, founding software engineer handling embedded systems, cloud infrastructure and software

The team now works out of a lab at Northeastern University's Roux Institute at 100 Fore St. in Portland, part of the ClimateTech Incubator.

How does the technology work?

The buoys, roughly the size of a basketball, integrate monitoring sensors, connectivity modules, onboard power and patent-pending low-power ultraviolet antifouling technology. They continuously collect data and stream it to customers in real time.

Thompson said the systems cost three to five times less than competing options, thanks to integrated modules designed and assembled in-house. Existing systems typically rely on periodic manual sampling and need cleaning and recalibration every few weeks, requiring costly boat time.

Most current deployments support shellfish aquaculture and research, with growing use in environmental monitoring, water utilities and beach safety.

Where is the money coming from?

The $1.74 million breaks down across three sources:

• $1.3 million pre-seed round led by Portland early-stage firm Corsair Venture Partners, with participation from Cumberland investment firm Anthrofix and other investors
• $250,000 loan from the Maine Technology Institute to support manufacturing scale-up and commercialization
• $190,000 NOAA Small Business Innovation Research Phase I award to fund further development and testing of the UV antifouling technology

"We've watched Bluesonde grow from a highly technical team with an early idea into a company with a commercial product, paying customers and real-world deployments," said Chris Wolfel, Corsair's founder and managing partner.

The company has worked with the University of Maine's Darling Marine Center, Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences, the Gulf of Maine Research Institute and other research and aquaculture partners to refine its hardware and field operations.

What's next for Bluesonde?

Bluesonde expects to add two hires in the coming months, expand its customer base beyond Maine and start scouting a larger facility in Greater Portland, possibly by next year. The team is also advancing the software and data infrastructure needed to support larger, more connected water-monitoring networks.

A jump from a 40-buoy footprint this year to a 200-buoy target in 2027 will test whether Bluesonde's low-cost model can outpace the manual-sampling incumbents in shellfish waters and beyond.