Built at the intersection of marine engineering and machine vision
Southampton, UK. Founded 2023. We built Ecodetect because offshore inspection teams were spending more engineering time watching footage than acting on what it showed.
Built by people who worked on the inspection problem
The founding team came out of offshore inspection and marine engineering. The problem we kept running into was straightforward: the survey vessel returns within days, the footage exists, but the report that turns it into something a regulator accepts takes six to twelve weeks to produce.
The bottleneck was not the analysis itself. It was the manual video review and the documentation assembly that followed. An engineer watching ROV footage at normal speed, logging findings by hand, cross-referencing GPS coordinates, and assembling a compliant report structure is doing work that computer vision can handle directly from the source frames.
Offshore wind capacity needs to grow substantially in the coming decade. The inspection and maintenance workload grows with it. The existing workflow cannot scale at that rate without automation in the most labour-intensive part of the chain.
Who builds Ecodetect
Background in marine technology and AI product development, with years spent on the offshore wind inspection supply chain. Co-founded Ecodetect in 2023 to address the reporting bottleneck he kept encountering in survey programmes.
Spent years building computer vision systems for industrial inspection applications, with particular focus on detecting material degradation in challenging imaging conditions. Leads the detection model programme at Ecodetect.
Background in offshore wind operations and maintenance project management, and has spent several years working on inspection compliance workflows for North Sea operators. Leads Ecodetect's early-access programme and operator relationships.
How we approach the work
Our mission is straightforward: make underwater infrastructure inspection as fast to review as it is to film. In 2025, Ecodetect raised an angel round of $750k to accelerate detection model development and expand the early-access operator programme.
Detection quality before speed
A fast report that misses a structural defect is worse than a slow one. We validate detection models on real offshore footage before expanding to new anomaly categories.
Surveyors stay in the loop
Ecodetect is not a replacement for inspection engineers. The platform handles video analysis; the surveyor reviews, confirms, and signs off. Professional accountability stays with the qualified engineer.
Reports that regulators accept
A report that does not satisfy the certifier is useless. We work directly with operators and their certification bodies to ensure output format and content meet each regulatory standard.
We chose Southampton because the problem we are solving is two miles from our desk. Offshore wind operators, inspection contractors, and regulatory consultants are our neighbours at the Ocean Village Innovation Centre.
Interested in the early-access programme?
We are working with a small group of offshore wind and marine infrastructure operators. Contact the team to discuss whether your inspection programme is a fit.