Mission: Why We Build
At A Glance
Knowingness becomes obscured by complexity, process, and handoffs. This fate is most apparent for structures that maintain civilization: offshore platforms, commercial ships, wind turbines rising from the sea floor. The biggest companies in the world are buried under data, 300m below the surface.
Manta seeks to restore subsea clarity, enabling America's largest service providers and national service to innovative, steward, and defend global waters.
Subsea inspection is trapped in the 1990s. The footage gets captured. Terabytes of video exist. But the output is still a human inspector copy-pasting screenshots into Microsoft Word for two weeks.
Report writing is the unoptimized bottleneck in a highly optimized value chain.
At Scale
Across 12,000 offshore platforms operated by the world's 50 largest energy companies, period checks and inspections add up. $450K for an annual inspection per platform, $100K for UWILDs per vessel. What’s that? Tsunami hit your oil rig? Another $300K for special surveys per platform. And quickly a $15B industry is born.
Why Now
Three macro forces are now converging to break this equilibrium:
Institutional knowledge loss crisis: Retirement outpaces recruitment 2-to-1. The pipeline of inspection engineers (people with engineering degrees, CSWIP 3.4U certifications, and a decade of offshore experience) cannot keep up with retirements.
Regulatory expansion: Compliance is entering the industry following an average of 200+ injuries per year with a 40x fatality rate, even compared to other high risk infra industries. Companies are being pushed for more inspections, more documentation, and higher standards.
AI capability: In 2025, fine-tuned foundation models achieve 90%+ accuracy on corrosion classification, marine growth density, and coating condition. The 80/20 is here for AI-enabled workflows.
Who We Are
Subsea inspection is complex and heavily gated. Manta is built by a combination of longtime startup operators with a passion for hairy problems and industry insiders at the top of the chain.
Email alexa@manta.inc if you want to build with us.
Archives: Current Reports
The subsea inspection industry is in a time pocket, trapped in the 1990s. Don't believe us? Take a look at some reports below.
The average subsea inspection for small ships is 20-45 pages. Single plant inspections range anywhere from 250 to 300 pages. As of 2026, these reports are still written manually. Employees of energy giants (or any public company) are restricted from integrated LLMs. If a rogue inspector explores frontier models, those models do not have asset knowledge or the ABS, DNS, or Lloyd inspection standards.
Manta will be the first integrated and deployed subsea inspection ecosystem.
