Turning Underwater Awareness into Strategic Advantage
At Join Capital, our investment decisions aren’t based solely on potential upside; they’re driven by strategic impact and lasting value. Often, the most critical strategic assets remain hidden in plain sight. For decades, underwater infrastructures like communication cables, pipelines, and offshore platforms have quietly supported global economies and national security. But as geopolitical tensions rise, these once-overlooked systems are now on the front line of national security, needing urgent innovation to secure and monitor them effectively.
This is where Optics11 steps up. This Dutch scale-up is rewriting the rulebook on how Europe protects critical power and subsea infrastructure.
Optics11 has identified this fundamental gap and is building a business that delivers proactive sensing systems designed specifically to enhance the resilience of aging energy infrastructure, which is crucial for enabling the much-needed energy transition, and improving underwater visibility. One technology, multiple products, two critical markets. They are doing this by integrating cutting-edge sensing technology, analytics and rapid response tools.
Why does this matter? Europe’s critical infrastructure has become a prime target. Whether facing nation-state sabotage or opportunistic cybercrime, the results of a compromised infrastructure can be disastrous and wide-reaching. The recent series of cable-breaking incidents in the Baltic Sea are stark reminders of the vulnerabilities at play, with officials still unable to publicly attribute responsibility. Furthermore, power outages at London’s Heathrow Airport and across the entirety of Spain and Portugal underscore the vulnerability of our infrastructure.
Optics11 tackles this by delivering a revolutionary solution that transforms how nations detect threats beneath ocean surfaces — where current surveillance methods fall drastically short.
Traditional undersea monitoring technologies, such as conventional sonar systems, come with significant limitations, making comprehensive coverage practically challenging. As critical infrastructure increasingly becomes a target for sabotage and covert disruption, nations require solutions that are not only advanced but also rapidly deployable and precise.
Optics11’s breakthrough is its proprietary fibre-optic sensing platform, an innovation that elegantly leverages fibre-optic sensors as continuous, passive, sensitive listening devices. Unlike traditional sensors, Optics11’s technology can pinpoint disturbances, whether they are sabotage attempts, unauthorized vessels, or natural disruptions — with unmatched accuracy and speed.
The technology can be deployed in various ways: alongside cables, across a coastline, statically on a sea-bed or towed as an array behind a moving vessel. In the towed configuration, it acts as a long fibre-optic cable embedded with underwater microphones, called hydrophones, capturing sound in real time with sub-nanometric precision. This enables the detection of manned and unmanned submarines, ships, divers or even torpedoes.
By simply deploying these advanced sensors along critical infrastructures, a nation gains real-time awareness of threats with unprecedented coverage with minimal intervention, especially when compared with the cost of building and deploying submarines. Optics11’s sensors have a range of up to 100km, which gives users a greater reaction time due to the larger surveillance area covered. Because the sensors are passive rather than active, they can detect without emitting signals — allowing them to monitor without revealing their presence.
This fibre-optic platform is more than a technological improvement; it’s a strategic leap forward. It reveals what was previously hidden in deeper waters, enabling more detailed detection, identification, and fingerprinting. For governments and private operators managing vast underwater assets, this represents not just operational efficiency but genuine strategic advantage.
Today, the tech is being used by the Dutch navy as part of their Orka program as well as a longer-term partnership to encourage collaboration between Dutch defence tech startups and the nation’s security infrastructure.
Moreover, Optics11’s technology emerged from and aligns closely with defence-driven innovation — a core focus at JOIN Capital. The platform originated as a solution to long-standing challenges identified by defence research agencies worldwide, embodying our investment thesis that transformative technologies often arise from the intersections of military need and commercial scalability.
Take DARPA’s “Ocean of Things” program, for example. Its goal is to create a persistent awareness of the maritime situation across large expanses of water by using a network of sensors to collect data such as the activities of vessels and other vehicles moving along the ocean.
“The breakthrough in their technology is that it’s simple and cheap. You can put it anywhere. You no longer need super expensive and amazing submarines to protect your harbours. You can tether optics11 sensors on the ocean floor and have always-on surveillance,” said Join Capital’s Partner Daniel Carew.
What sets Optics11 apart isn’t just its technological edge but also its timing. As Europe and its allies reassess their strategic priorities amid shifting geopolitical alliances, robust and scalable undersea surveillance has become essential. Optics11 demonstrates that Europe can independently monitor its maritime domains, from sea to sky, without depending on globally sourced solutions, ensuring vital technological sovereignty. By securing underwater assets, Europe strengthens both its economic stability and strategic independence, objectives that have become increasingly critical in today’s multipolar world.
