Acoustic Researcher Pelagon

The sea is the physical layer of the economythe conduit for our energy communications and trade. It is also Europes exposed flank. Pelagon is building the answer.

Founded by Aymeric (serial deeptech entrepreneur; founded & exited Scortex Leading AI solution for manufacturing quality) and Gauthier (Navy officer and McKinsey) Pelagon is building a foundational multimodal acoustic model for autonomous maritime protection (underwater and surface) in service of European sovereignty. It will be deployed on a distributed autonomous network of vectors (UUVs buoys sailbuoys seabed) to provide real-time understanding of underwater threats.

France and Europe have world-class acoustic engineers and a long history in underwater warfare. By bridging this expertise with modern physical-AI strategies (as seen in autonomous driving and robotics). Europe is still missing its naval NeoPrime Pelagon aims to become to lead the way in autonomous marine protectionfrom detection to interceptionpartnering with leading navies primes and neo-primes while also operating its own fleet as a service.

Pelagon is backed by Hexa the pioneer startup studio in Europe which has launched 35 companies including unicorns like Front Aircall and Spendesk combining 230m ARR and 750m raised.

Why this matters

The sea is the physical layer of the economy and Europes most exposed flank. Everything that moves beneath the surface leaves an acoustic trace but the ocean is a brutal channel: multipath ambient noise shifting propagation. Reading it is first and foremost a physics problem.

France and Europe have a world-class heritage in underwater acoustics and sonar. Pelagons bet is to bridge that science with modern physical-AI strategies and a distributed fleet of UUVs buoys sailbuoys and seabed sensors. As our Acoustic Researcher you are the physics backbone of that system the person who understands underwater sound deeply enough that our models can learn from it. You partner directly with our AI Engineers who consume the features representations and data you help define.

What youll do

• Model underwater sound propagation across realistic ocean environments to enable our synthetic data generation pipeline.

• Characterize and classify acoustic signatures of surface and underwater targets; build the ground-truth understanding our multimodal acoustic model is trained against.

• Design and reason about sensor and array geometries: what to deploy where and how to extract maximum information from constrained & distributed vectors.

• Work hand in hand with AI Engineers on physics-constrained learning strategies ans models.

Why join now

• Founding ownership. Youll be one of the first engineers and will define the technical foundation of the company. Meaningful equity comes with that.

• A mission with weight. This is hardware that protects critical infrastructure and Europes maritime space.

• Real things in the real ocean fast. Youll see your work in the water within weeks not years.

• AI-first at the edge in the real world. We train our own models and run them where it counts: in the water on the device. Youll be solving the edge-ML and power problems most companies only talk about.

• A sovereign European deeptech at the inflection point of a market with strong NATO and EU policy momentum behind it.