Persistent, affordable autonomous surface vessels for coastal enforcement, Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) protection, and maritime intelligence — engineered and manufactured in South Africa.
Request Investor BriefingKaapwave is at pre-seed stage — the technology is being built, the market is real, and the founding team has the engineering depth to execute. We are raising to accelerate hardware development, complete sea trials, and secure our first contracts. If you back deep-tech companies before the crowd arrives, this is the conversation to have.
The KW-01 Sentry is a compact, fast autonomous patrol vessel built for Africa's coastal enforcement reality — where coverage requirements are vast and budgets are constrained. Fully autonomous from launch to recovery.
Trailer-deployable in under 30 minutes. No harbour infrastructure required. Operates in sea states up to Sea State 6+. Modular payload bay accepts surveillance, ISR, or survey configurations.
Continuous autonomous surveillance of territorial waters, harbour approaches, and exclusive economic zones — without placing crew in harm's way.
Real-time vessel detection, classification, and tracking using AI and EO/IR sensors. Full surveillance record streamed to shore command in real time.
Persistent environmental monitoring, fisheries surveillance, and oceanographic data collection from offshore energy and fishing grounds.
Sovereign Engineering
Every system aboard a Kaapwave USV — from the flight controller and autopilot stack to the navigation algorithms and power management firmware — is designed and produced by our own engineers. We do not license, white-label, or depend on external autonomy providers.
This is a deliberate strategic choice. Vertical integration gives us full visibility into every layer of the stack, enabling rapid iteration, deep customisation for harsh maritime environments, and the ability to guarantee system integrity without exposure to third-party supply-chain risk.
Our team carries the expertise to see this through — from embedded systems and real-time control theory to sensor fusion, fault-tolerant architectures, and ruggedised hardware manufacturing.
Purpose-built marine control hardware and firmware tuned for wave dynamics, wind loading, and multi-mode propulsion — designed from the ground up for surface operations at sea.
Full autonomy pipeline developed in-house: mission planning, real-time path optimisation, obstacle avoidance, and safe-return logic — owned end-to-end.
Power, propulsion, communications, and payload interfaces designed as a cohesive system — not bolted-together subsystems from separate vendors.
We are building something significant. If Africa's maritime security gap looks like an opportunity to you, we want to talk. No deck spam. No pitch theatre. Just a direct conversation about what we are building and why now.