The world needs critical minerals more than ever, but almost every way we get them today inflicts real damage. MOBY Robotics thinks there is a better source sitting untouched on the deep ocean floor, waiting to be picked up rather than extracted from the earth.
The Miami company builds autonomous robots that collect critical minerals from the seabed, and in doing so it is wading into one of the most debated topics in the environmental space. Critical minerals like nickel, cobalt, and copper are the raw materials behind batteries, electronics, and the broader shift to clean energy, which makes how we source them an important question.
The company name nods to Moby Dick, reimagined for ocean robotics. Its coral orange logo, a whale tail rendered as a swarm, captures the core idea, which is autonomous systems working together to reach the deep ocean responsibly.
The founding story begins with Nate Clemett, co-founder and CTO. Clemett grew up sailing, earned his captain’s license at 19, and spent about four years sailing around the world as a charter captain before finishing his degree at the University of Washington and landing in its Applied Physics Lab. He went on to the University of Michigan, where he earned a PhD in naval architecture and marine engineering along with a master’s in robotics, both focused on underwater vehicles.
When federal hiring froze under DOGE cuts and stalled the jobs he was eyeing, co-founder and CEO Alexander Petersen, who brings 15 years across finance and business and a Forbes 30 Under 30 spot, suggested he build the job he actually wanted. That led to the founding of MOBY Robotics in May 2025, and the company has moved fast since.
READ MORE: Inside MOBY Robotics, the Miami startup rethinking how we get critical minerals
The technology is a coordinated system that works in stages. First, an autonomous underwater vehicle maps the seabed to find where mineral nodules sit in high concentration. Then a seafloor crawler collects them and transfers them into a central collection net. Nothing is drilled or extracted. The nodules are potato-sized lumps that sit loose on the ocean floor, scattered across vast stretches of the abyssal plain. “I call them little truffles,” Clemett says, describing how easy they are to pick up.
That distinction is the whole point, and the founders set a high bar before moving forward. “We’d only pursue this if we had conviction that it was ten times better than the status quo,” Clemett says.
The status quo has its problems. Today around 70% of global nickel comes from Indonesia, where mining sits beneath rainforest that is critical habitat for endangered species. Cobalt comes largely from the Democratic Republic of Congo, where the industry is tied to well documented child labor and human rights abuses. Copper grades keep declining, pushing operations almost a kilometer underground. The MOBY Robotics team argues the abyssal plain offers a contrast, it sits 4,000 to 6,000 meters beneath the ocean’s surface and holds less life than the Sahara.
That responsibility case is also the business case. MOBY plans to operate as a systems provider, working with mineral rights holders rather than mining directly, and regulation is moving in its favor. Operators will be required to use the best available technology with heavy weight on environmental stewardship, so the cleaner and more efficient MOBY can prove its system to be, the more those rules work as a tailwind rather than a barrier.
For now, the near term job is proving the technology. The team is running engineering sprints toward a first pilot, testing with the US government off Florida at around 1,000 meters, where real ocean conditions matter more than anything they can replicate in a tank.
But collecting minerals is only the first use of what they are building. The deeper goal is to radically reduce the cost of reaching the ocean floor and actually seeing it in high resolution video instead of sonar, which opens the door to large-scale seafloor mapping that has barely been attempted. That broader platform is what has drawn interest well beyond mining, from scientists to national security, including meetings with the Pentagon and an invitation to the White House.
For a company with that kind of reach, the choice to build in Miami is deliberate. Proximity to the ocean and the surrounding pieces back it up, with a test site off Jacksonville, a naval base, and universities producing talent nearby. “My hope is for Miami to become the hub for ocean technology,” Clemett says, the way other cities became hubs for space. Petersen sees the same opening on the investment side, pointing out that ocean tech stays underfunded relative to space despite a far larger ocean economy.
For a company built to reach the deep ocean affordably, the pieces are starting to fall into place.
