In 2022, S2G helped found Apeiron Labs around one question: what would it take to cut the cost of collecting ocean data by a factor of 100, or even 1,000? The answer turned out to be low-cost underwater gliders combined with software that manages the network and processes measurements for customers. These vehicles are dual-use by design, and as demand for security rises, new investors and buyers are increasingly interested in technology that also improves weather forecasting, climate monitoring and our understanding of the ocean.

In this episode, S2G’s Sanjeev Krishnan sits down with Apeiron co-founder Ravi Pappu and CEO Rob Rainhart to talk about how far the company has come, from a PowerPoint slide to thousands of hours of operation at sea. Ravi and Rob share how advances in cars, drones, and satellites helped them solve a tough systems engineering problem, and why the cost of watching an entire hurricane season in the Gulf of Mexico could soon be a rounding error. They also explain how steady, long-term ocean measurements could become some of the most valuable inputs to AI forecasting models, and why Ravi believes the company is one large manufacturing run away from delivering that data at scale.

Chapters:

00:02:01 – Ravi and Rob's backgrounds
00:06:08 – The Ocean as a Global Blind Spot
00:10:16 – Validating the Low-Cost Sensing Model
00:14:51 – Lessons from the Aerial Drone Industry
00:19:14 – The Shift Toward Undersea Conflict
00:22:57 – Rebuilding Ocean Mapping and Navigation
00:26:46 – Commercial Applications in Energy, Shipping, and Insurance
00:30:47 – Engineering for Scale and Affordability
00:34:44 – The Role of AI in Ocean Intelligence
00:39:02 – The Future of Global Ocean Monitoring

This content is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal, business, tax or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investor or potential investor in any investment vehicle sponsored by S2G. Investing involves risk, including the risk of loss. Specific companies mentioned in this podcast are for educational purposes and should not be construed as an endorsement of any kind. S2G holds positions in the companies referenced, but this podcast is for information purposes only and is not intended to promote any such company. All views of the guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of S2G. Any past performance discussed is not indicative of future results. The views expressed herein are opinions based on certain assumptions and subject to change.

For more important information, please see s2ginvestments.com/disclosures.

For years, S2G has backed ocean monitoring for its impact on climate, fisheries, and ocean health, but rising geopolitical tensions have made it a national security priority too, and investment is following. The same technology that improves weather forecasts, tracks climate change, spots illegal fishing and follows whale migrations can also protect undersea cables, monitor shipping lanes and support defense. That dual use is what’s bringing new funding into the space. In this episode, S2G’s Sanjeev Krishnan and Kate Danaher join Tonya Bakritzes to talk about why these worlds are converging, and how the government has long been the first big customer for new technology, from GPS to semiconductors. They also take on the tough questions, including the risks of building a business on government contracts and how data collected for security could be put to work for the public good. The conversation sets the stage for next week’s episode with Apeiron Labs, whose low-cost underwater sensing vehicles serve both defense and climate-related use cases.

00:40: From Ocean Health to National Security
04:22: Why Government Is Often the First Customer
06:35: Why Ocean Monitoring Matters Now
09:25: How Ocean Warming Raises the Stakes
10:40: The Hard Questions of Dual Use Technologies
14:04: Putting Security Data to Public Use
16:15: Commercial Uses Beyond Government
17:47: Looking Ahead to the Next Decade

This content is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal, business, tax or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investor or potential investor in any investment vehicle sponsored by S2G. Investing involves risk, including the risk of loss. Specific companies mentioned in this podcast are for educational purposes and should not be construed as an endorsement of any kind. S2G holds positions in the companies referenced, but this podcast is for information purposes only and is not intended to promote any such company. All views of the guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of S2G. Any past performance discussed is not indicative of future results. The views expressed herein are opinions based on certain assumptions and subject to change.

For more important information, please see s2ginvestments.com/disclosures.

Capital is flowing into AI infrastructure at an unprecedented scale, but investors are not sharing risk equally. In both chips and data center financing, lenders generally favor amortizing structures that fully repay debt during the initial lease term. As a result, equity investors bear the residual value risk of the underlying assets, including both facilities and hardware. This dynamic reflects a core element of S2G’s Age of Adaptation thesis: the evolving cost and pricing of capital.

Karen Fang, Global Head of Infrastructure & Sustainable Finance and Co-Head of the Global Capital Solutions at Bank of America, has spent 28 years in finance. She says nothing compares to the size of the deals she's working on now, and the cost of financing these projects has risen over the last year due to higher rates and wider spreads. In this episode, she and Sanjeev Krishnan discuss how different risk horizons can shape the way debt and equity investors price data center projects, what happens when chipmakers no longer guarantee the residual value of their chips, and why comparisons to the dot-com crash miss the mark. She also explains why solar and batteries still make up most of the new power capacity added to the U.S. grid. And she walks through a $16 billion data center campus in Michigan, financed through a structure her team designed, that uses existing grid capacity alongside battery storage, rather than relying on new power generation.

If you invest in or finance real assets, this episode offers a useful look at how someone close to these deals thinks about risks the market is still learning to price.

Chapters:

02:04 – Karen’s path from China to Tokyo to Wall Street
04:44 – Starting a finance career in the middle of the 1998 crisis
07:23 – The big trends reshaping investing, and why inflation may stick around
11:18 – Why the AI boom is nothing like the dot-com era
13:01 – Are we actually building too few data centers?
14:42 – How higher interest rates are raising the cost of AI projects
19:04 – Easing equipment shortages and the case for industrial policy
22:22 – Who really carries the risk on data centers and chips
28:41 – Why AI demand is fueling a solar and battery buildout
32:27 – Winning community support, and what’s coming next

This content is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal, business, tax or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investor or potential investor in any investment vehicle sponsored by S2G. Investing involves risk, including the risk of loss. Specific companies mentioned in this podcast are for educational purposes and should not be construed as an endorsement of any kind. S2G holds positions in the companies referenced, but this podcast is for information purposes only and is not intended to promote any such company. All views of the guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of S2G. Any past performance discussed is not indicative of future results. The views expressed herein are opinions based on certain assumptions and subject to change.

For more important information, please see s2ginvestments.com/disclosures.