# Saildrone

**Canonical:** https://apis.io/providers/saildrone/  
**Website:** https://www.saildrone.com  
**APIs profiled:** 3

Saildrone is an Alameda, California maritime autonomy company that designs, manufactures, and operates a global fleet of wind/solar-powered autonomous surface vehicles (USVs) for ocean science, maritime domain awareness, and defense applications. Founded in 2012 by Richard Jenkins, the company runs four USV classes — Explorer (23ft, environmental sensing), Voyager (33ft, MDA and counter-narcotics), Surveyor (65ft, deep-ocean bathymetric mapping), and the newer Spectre (ISR / anti-submarine warfare / kinetic payloads). Saildrone has logged over 2.5M nautical miles and 65,000 days at sea across customers including NOAA PMEL, NOAA SWFSC, the US Navy (Task Force 59), NASA, EUMETSAT, BOEM, and Lockheed Martin (which invested $50M in October 2025). Saildrone delivers data through two product surfaces — the Saildrone Mission Portal (secure web app for tasking and live multi-INT visualization) and the Saildrone Public Mission API (BETA) at developer-mission.saildrone.com, which exposes key/secret authenticated endpoints for health, drone access discovery, and time-series retrieval across vehicle, atmospheric, oceanographic, and biogeochemical datasets. Open ocean data from past missions is published via NOAA PMEL ERDDAP and NCEI under open-data terms.

## Kin Score — 40.4 / 100 (developing)

Scored 2026-08-20 under rubric 0.12.0. Trend: flat (+0.0 from 40.4).

| Facet | Score |
|---|---|
| Discoverability | 64.8 |
| Contract Quality | 71.1 |
| Governance | 25.0 |
| Contract Governance | 25.0 |
| Operational Transparency | 36.8 |
| Developer Ergonomics | 2.4 |
| Commercial Clarity | 39.5 |
| Access Clarity | 39.5 |

## Agent readiness — 18.4 (agent-aware)

| Dimension | Value |
|---|---|
| Spec Presence | yes |
| Agentic Access | no |
| Reversibility Documented | no |
| MCP Server | no |
| Auth Clarity | no |
| Idempotency | no |
| Error Semantics | no |
| OpenAPI Examples | no |
| Rate Limit Signal | documented |
| Event Surface Described | no |
| Agent Skills | no |
| Well Known Catalog | no |
| Consent Identity | no |
| Agent Card | no |
| Dry Run Mode | no |

## Access

Free · Requires approval — onboarding: approval, pricing: free, trial: no (confidence: medium).

## APIs (3)

- **Saildrone Authentication API** — Key/secret exchange for bearer tokens and drone access discovery
- **Saildrone Health API** — Service health check
- **Saildrone Time Series API** — Mission time-series data across vehicle, atmospheric, oceanographic, and biogeochemical datasets

## Security (1)

- **Saildrone Domain Security** — TLSv1.3 · HSTS · DMARC

## Plans (1)

- **Saildrone Plans Pricing**

## Tags

Maritime, Ocean Data, USV, Unmanned Surface Vehicle, Autonomous Systems, METOC, Maritime Domain Awareness, Anti-Submarine Warfare, Defense, Climate, Oceanography, Bathymetry, Biogeochemical

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Profiled by [API Evangelist](https://apievangelist.com) and published on [APIs.io](https://apis.io/providers/saildrone/). Scores are computed from the provider's own public artifacts under a published rubric.