🔒Kittery ocean data startup backed by Maine Angels fund

Kittery startup Coastal Measures, which tracks coastal and ocean data using an artificial intelligence platform, received a $260,000 investment from a network of investors called Maine Angels.

Maine Angels provides capital, mentorship and connectivity to founders with the potential to grow in and from Maine.

The investment to Coastal Measures came through Maine Angels’ Dirigo III sidecar fund and individual members.

Syncing data

The startup’s goal is to address a gap in how the maritime and coastal industries manage and monetize the vast amounts of sensor data they generate.

“When a storm threatens a coastline, the people responsible for protecting it — port operators, insurers, city managers, infrastructure engineers — are often working from different data sources that don’t agree, can’t sync and weren’t built to talk to each other,” Josh Humberston, co-founder and CEO, cited as an example earlier this year. “Decisions get made anyway. Sometimes that works. Sometimes it doesn’t.”

Partnering with sensor vendors, Coastal Measures’ Cumulus AI platform aggregates fragmented, incompatible data streams and turns them into actionable intelligence for coastal operators, insurers and engineers, according to a news release.

Pre-seed round

The Maine Angels investment is part of Coastal Measures’ ongoing pre-seed round, bringing the company’s total funding to more than $1.5 million, building on previously announced backing from Amazon Web Services and others.

The company is a member of the Roux Institute’s ClimateTech incubator. Maine Angels is a venture partner of the Roux Institute.

“This investment gives us the runway to scale Cumulus into the ports, harbors and coastal municipalities that have been waiting for better data infrastructure,” said Humberston.

In May, Humberston moderated a panel discussion at Startup Maine in Portland on “Demystifying Data for Startups,” exploring how early-stage companies can build defensible data strategies.

Kittery relocation

Humberston is an oceanographer turned data scientist who has led multi-million-dollar environmental data programs across civil, energy, defense and intelligence missions. The startup’s co-founder, Neil Schonwald, is a systems engineer and repeat founder who has turned technical ideas into successful companies like Signal Digits and Meetinghouse (acquired by Cisco and HP), according to their bios.

Coastal Measures was established as a limited liability corporation in 2019 in Portsmouth, N.H. It became a C corporation in 2025.

With much of the work being done in Maine, it established an office at the Roux Institute in Portland a year ago, then moved the office to 7 Wallingford Square in Kittery about two months ago.

The decision to base Coastal Measures in Kittery reflected a combination of state and federal financing incentives and Maine’s natural advantages as a hub of the blue economy and the company’s growing ties to the Roux Institute.

The company has four full-time and five part-time employees whose expertise includes radar networks, data governance for regulated industries and commercial software.

Fragmented data

So far, customers using the platform include the University of New Hampshire, the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries and users of ports and harbors from Maine to Rhode Island. The company is in talks with similar stakeholders on the West Coast, said Humberston.

Vendors include Bluesonde, a water data and intelligence startup in Portland, which earlier this year won a” Climate Innovation Award” from ClimateWorks Maine.

Most people don’t know there are thousands of sensors in the ocean, collecting data such as wave action, water temperature and salinity, Humberston told Mainebiz.

“Many people need to understand how the ocean and coastal areas behave,” he said. “The challenge is, no one knows how to get all of the data and make sense of it.”

For example, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration deploys hundreds of water sensors, with the data typically available to technical users.

“We want to make it generally accessible,” he said.

Cumulus pools data streams into one platform, standardizes it and makes it easy to see with a click of a button, he said.

Oyster farm

In one case, Coastal Measures recently worked with an oyster farmer to deploy a water-quality sensor purchased from a partner vendor. The sensor measures factors such as tides, storms and weather, allowing the farmer to better judge how they affect the farm’s water quality and growing season.

“We’re trying to get beyond silos of data,” Humberston said. “We’re trying to bring as much as we possibly can into one place, so you don’t have to go platform to platform and data to data.”

Coastal Measures has 160 active users. Enrolling users involves lots of travel, cold calls and social media.

“We’re doing a lot of sales and marketing,” he said, “Everyone we talk with says, ‘I have seven different systems I have to sign into to use the data.’”