McLean, Va., & Bedford, Mass., March 13, 2025 – MITRE and Sofar Ocean are accelerating the development of Bristlemouth, a new connectivity standard for marine technology. Bristlemouth provides a modern hardware interface protocol and ocean-proof connector to support peer-to-peer network interoperability and unlock system integration for ocean sensing and exploration at an unprecedented scale.

“To accelerate ocean and maritime technology, we need to eliminate needless burdens and barriers,” said Nicholas Rotker, MITRE’s chief bluetech strategist. “A connectivity standard for ocean technology will enable new entrants to reduce the time it takes to get innovative hardware from the lab bench to the ocean.”

Proprietary hardware interface protocols and complex connections have slowed innovation and product development and have made it difficult to integrate marine technology at scale. The Bristlemouth standard removes these barriers and empowers the public and private sectors to collaborate on bringing new interoperable solutions to market more quickly.

To rapidly expand adoption of Bristlemouth, MITRE will fully enable its BlueTech Lab in Massachusetts with the standard, creating the world’s first Bristlemouth center of excellence. The lab will serve as a testbed for Bristlemouth developers to accelerate marine technology solutions.

“Scaling ocean data and exploration is extraordinarily hard—it should not be,” said Tim Janssen, co-founder and CEO of Sofar Ocean. “Bristlemouth is the foundational technology to remove the largest hurdle to unlocking ocean information at scale. Our partnership with MITRE is an important catalyst to accelerate the impact of this critical open standard.”

Bristlemouth is funded by Sofar Ocean, MITRE, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Oceankind, the Office of Naval Research (ONR), Ocean Discovery League, Schmidt Marine Technology Partners, Builders Vision, Dalio Philanthropies, and Aqualink.