On Monday, May 4, Oregon startup Panthalassa announced it raised $140 million in Series B funding led by Peter Thiel, the PayPal and Palantir co-founder known for early investments in Facebook and his contrarian tech bets. The deal values the company at close to $1 billion, according to a person familiar with the terms reported by the Financial Times.
The new money will finish building a pilot manufacturing facility near Portland and get the first ocean units deployed next year. Panthalassa has spent a decade developing technology to power artificial intelligence by putting floating platforms, a giant steel structure, in the ocean that run entirely on wave energy, with no connection to land-based power grids.
Damilare Odedina
What Panthalassa Actually Builds
The company calls its floating platforms "nodes." Each one is 85 meters long, made of solid steel, with most of the structure sitting below the ocean surface.
The nodes work by forcing water through a turbine as they bob up and down with the waves. That generates electricity, which powers AI chips sealed inside a protected container. The surrounding ocean water cools the hardware. The platforms drive themselves to their destination using the shape of their hull to move through waves without an engine.
They connect to the internet using SpaceX's Starlink satellites to send data back to land.
Garth Sheldon-Coulson, Panthalassa's co-founder and CEO, said in a statement: "There are three sources of energy on the planet with tens of terawatts of new capacity potential: solar, nuclear, and the open ocean. We've built a technology platform that operates in the planet's most energy-dense wave regions, far from shore, and turns that resource into reliable clean power."
Who Else Invested and What's Next
The round included major Silicon Valley investors. John Doerr, an early investor in Google and Amazon, joined alongside Marc Benioff's TIME Ventures, PayPal co-founder Max Levchin's SciFi Ventures, Susquehanna Sustainable Investments, Hanwha Group, Super Micro Computer, and Figma CEO Dylan Field.
Returning investors include Founders Fund, Gigascale Capital, and Lowercarbon Capital. Panthalassa has now raised a total of $210 million, a company spokesperson confirmed.
Panthalassa tested earlier prototypes called Ocean-1, Ocean-2, and Wavehopper in sea trials in 2021 and 2024. The company plans to deploy its Ocean-3 pilot series in the northern Pacific Ocean in 2026, with commercial deployments scheduled for 2027.
Peter Thiel said in a statement: "The future demands more compute than we can imagine. Extra-terrestrial solutions are no longer science fiction. Panthalassa has opened the ocean frontier."
The company has 120 employees and operates as a public benefit corporation headquartered in Portland. It was founded in 2016.
Damilare Odedina
