Kraken Robotics has entered into an agreement to acquire Covelya Group, the leading international provider of mission-critical underwater technology solutions operating through its subsidiary companies: Sonardyne, EIVA, Forcys, Wavefront SystemsVoyis Imaging and Chelsea Technologies.
The Company will acquire Covelya Group for total consideration of $615 million, excluding transaction costs and subject to adjustment, of which $480 million will be paid in cash and $135 million will be satisfied through the issue of common shares.
The combined revenue was $365 million in 2025 with a Combined Adjusted EBITDA margin of 24%. It allows for deeper customer relationships in the fast-growing defence and maritime surveillance market expanding
Recent events have highlighted the fragility and criticality of this subsea infrastructure and the importance of timely, reliable subsea intelligence. The vulnerability of this infrastructure is no longer theoretical, particularly in today’s increasingly contested geopolitical environment.
When low-cost mines shut down strategic waterways, global trade suffers. Whether caused by deliberate action, accidental damage, or natural events, the disruption of subsea cables and pipelines can affect entire regions.
Monitoring, protecting, and powering critical infrastructure with accurate and timely subsea intelligence is a priority for national-security and economic interests alike. Governments and commercial operators are responding by increasing their investment in the subsea domain. At the same time, advances in autonomy, artificial intelligence, persistent sensing, and secure underwater communications are converging.
This global demand for integrated and innovative subsea intelligence was a key factor behind Kraken Robotics’ recent acquisition of the Covelya Group, bringing together Kraken’s suite of subsea sonar and energy capabilities with those of Sonardyne, EIVA, Forcys, Voyis, and Chelsea Technologies.
This transaction is different from many of the consolidations our industry has seen in the past – it is not a conglomerate absorbing a much smaller company, but rather a combination
of world leaders with complementary capabilities. With integrated overlap and strong alignment across technologies, customers, markets, and geographic reach, the combination expands what we can offer customers at a time of growing demand for integrated subsea capability.
Now that we are operating under one roof, Kraken and its global businesses provide a uniquely broad portfolio of technologies spanning the entire underwater mission.
INTEGRATED, PLATFORM-AGNOSTIC SYSTEMS
Few organizations can offer a complete underwater technology stack – from acoustic sensing and optical imaging to navigation, positioning, mission software, communications, power systems, and long-term monitoring.
Put simply, Kraken today provides the eyes, ears, heart, and brain that can help transform a platform into a strategic subsea intelligence asset.
Increasingly, the conversations we are hearing from customers are about a single, narrow navigation system. They’re about solving end-to-end operational challenges. That may mean equipping a UUV for a mine countermeasures mission, inspecting critical underwater infrastructure over a large area, monitoring an offshore energy asset throughout its lifecycle, or rapidly collecting and interpreting data in a contested environment.
By bringing together complementary capabilities across sensors, payloads, software, and services, we can help customers assemble the right system for each application. As one company, our clients will benefit from fewer integration risks, fewer vendors to coordinate, less engineering effort, faster deployment, and optimized size, weight, and power.
Customers are also increasingly operating with diverse fleets of platforms and sensors, from AUVs, ROVs, USVs, and surface ships to stationary subsea installations. They can’t be locked into one platform – they need a combination of solutions best suited to their missions.
This is why Kraken’s suite of sensors are platform-agnostic: we want customers to be able to achieve consistently high-quality results across a wide range of platforms. This means a sensor loses the quality of the data it delivers and the decisions that data enables. With tightly integrated systems and software, we are helping customers turn data into understanding and understanding into action, more quickly and with greater confidence.
INNOVATION AT SCALE – WORLDWIDE
Growth can create new opportunities, but it can also slow organizations down. Larger companies can become more siloed, more bureaucratic, and further removed from their customers. Our team prides itself on “eating our own cooking” – we use our own products in our service business every day, and we are determined to maintain a focus on agile innovation with demonstrated reliability as we grow.
At approximately 1,200 employees, the combined organization has greater engineering depth, financial capacity, and global reach. At the same time, we intend to preserve the entrepreneurial thinking, technical creativity and customer focus that is ingrained into each of our employees.
Our advantage has always been the ability to listen closely to customers, respond quickly, and solve difficult problems. Bringing these companies together gives our teams access to operations in 10 countries, with over 50 years of history supporting our customers where and when they need it.
An engineer working on sonar performance can now collaborate more readily with specialists in navigation, power, and communications. That creates opportunities not only to improve existing products, but also to develop entirely new system-level capabilities and field them quickly with our customers.
Our goal is to bring together the agility and technical ambition of specialist companies with the resources, stability, and global reach of a larger organization – while preserving the determination to stand alongside our customers behind the products in the field.
WHAT COMES NEXT?
Our first priority is to integrate effectively while continuing to meet our commitments to customers, partners, and employees. We are building a common culture in partnership with our employees, meeting with teams across the business to identify what works, what should change, and where we can collaborate closer to provide value to our customers.
We will continue to develop our operations and teams around the world, especially in countries where we already have a footprint including the UK, Canada, Denmark, Germany, United States, and Australia.
We see significant opportunities to leverage investment in research and development across the organization to refine sensor fusion, develop precisely integrated mission systems, advance persistent subsea monitoring, and rapidly test new capabilities with our deep field expertise from our existing service operations.
We believe the future belongs to open, interoperable systems that allow operators to select the right vehicle for the mission without compromising sensor performance. Successful organizations will combine sensing, autonomy, communications, analytics, and artificial intelligence into solutions that help operators understand the underwater environment faster and act with greater confidence.
That is the organization we are building: technically ambitious, globally capable, and focused on solving some of the world’s most complex subsea challenges. And we are just getting started.
Article: Integration, Innovation & the Future of the Marine Technology Landscape
