Autonomous speedboat designer Saronic aims to use its fat warchest to build America’s largest shipyard and help the US to once again dominate commercial and military shipbuilding.
Ona muggy August morning in the sugar cane fields of Franklin, Louisiana, a group of executives from Saronic’s Austin headquarters stood sweating in blazers. Alongside them: local politicians and shipyard workers in teal shirts and steel-toed boots—employees whose jobs had been saved from closure by the well-funded builder of robotic speedboats.
As they watched, CEO Dino Mavrookas donned a fireproof coat and gloves, pulled on a welder’s mask, and, in a shower of sparks, carefully spot-welded the company emblem onto the aluminum keel of the largest vessel the three-year-old startup has attempted to build: the 150-foot-long Marauder.
Saronic designed the unmanned vessel to carry two 40-foot cargo containers up to 3,500 miles at 30% less cost than a crewed ship. Conceptually, it’s ideal for shuttling commercial cargo to smaller U.S. ports. But for now, it’s too expensive to ferry supplies during wartime to U.S. troops spread out across the Pacific — or deliver a boatload of hurt from missile launchers.
The way the genial Mavrookas sees it, Marauder is a major step toward reclaiming maritime dominance for the United States. By removing crews—and all the systems needed to support human life onboard—he argues that Saronic can make ships simpler, faster, and cheaper to build, potentially jumpstarting America’s withered shipbuilding industry. “We don’t just want to compete with the Chinese,” he told Forbes. “We want to outbuild the Chinese.”
The 44-year-old former Navy SEAL is facing long odds. Over the past two decades, China, through low labor costs and heavy state investments, has risen from an afterthought to become the world’s dominant shipbuilder. It now produces 53% of the world’s commercial ships, according to a recent estimate from the think tank CSIS. The U.S., which was the global shipbuilding titan exiting World War II, produces a miniscule 0.1%. Last year alone, the China State Shipbuilding Corporation built more commercial vessels by tonnage than the entire U.S. shipbuilding industry has produced since the end of World War II. The Chinese navy now has more vessels than the U.S., though American warships still pack double the number of missile launch cells.
With a potential Taiwan conflict looming—U.S. intelligence says Chinese Premier Xi Jinping wants his military ready to invade by 2027—Washington is on high alert. Both parties are pushing to expand the Navy and the civilian cargo fleet needed to support a war in the Pacific. President Trump’s $29 billion “Big Beautiful Bill,” passed in July, includes major funding for naval shipbuilding and industrial base revitalization. But the lack of domestic shipyard capacity and workers is a bottleneck that can’t quickly be overcome.
Saronic is one of a growing number of defense startups pitching the Pentagon on a different approach: mass-producing small, cheap, autonomous vessels that can operate in swarms—patrolling, resupplying, and engaging without risking human lives. If one gets lost, it’s no big loss.
Saronic is the best-funded of the bunch. In February, it raised $600 million at a $4 billion valuation from backers including Elad Gil and Andreessen Horowitz, bringing its total funding to $850 million—more than triple that of its closest competitor, Saildrone, according to PitchBook.
In May, Saronic won another measure of validation that separates it from the pack – a Navy contract worth up to $392 million that appears to be for Corsair, a 24-foot boat that the company says costs less than $2 million. The award tops competitor BlackSea, which says it’s churning out 30 16-foot robot boats a month under a contract worth up to $212 million.
Saronic CEO Dino Mavrookas with the Marauder.
Saronic
Saronic says it’s starting to build Corsair at volume. It’s turned out more than 100 at its Austin factory since building the first 14 months ago, and is now producing them at a rate of 500 a year. And it’s preparing to open a bigger factory in November that will quintuple that number.
But apart from Corsair, Saronic is pivoting to leave the crowded field of small boats to others as it aims for bigger sizes, longer ranges, increased mission capabilities and bigger fees. Mavrookas plans to raze the cane fields around the shipyard in Franklin, La., and invest more than $500 million over three to five years to expand its capacity to build up to 50 vessels a year that measure up to 250 feet in length.
That’s just an appetizer. Saronic is considering sites across the U.S. to build a mammoth shipyard from scratch that it’s calling Port Alpha. Mavrookas is aiming to spend $5 billion over five years to construct a hyper-efficient, modern shipyard sprawling over 1,000 acres and a mile of waterfront. That would be double the size of the largest yard in the U.S., Newport News, where aircraft carriers are built. (One site it’s considering, reportedly, is on the Sacramento River in northern California’s Solana County, where wealthy investors are seeking to build a new city.) Starting next year, Mavrookas hopes Port Alpha will produce 400 to 500 vessels up to 1,000 feet in length, including robot Panamax-class freighters.
“85 years ago we built over 18,000 naval vessels in one year during World War II. We’re capable of doing it. We just need to rethink how.”
The company’s efforts to transform how ships are manufactured are being directed by employee No. 3, John Morgan, formerly a production manager at SpaceX. Borrowing a page from that company and Tesla, he wants to save time at Port Alpha by building vessels in a big tent during construction.
Mavrookas is fully aware how implausible it all sounds, but he argues the money Saronic is bringing to a long capital-starved industry will allow for transformative innovation in how ships are built. “85 years ago we built over 18,000 naval vessels in one year during World War II,” he said. “We’re capable of doing it. We just need to rethink how.”
Skeptics say that Saronic has yet to prove out that its autonomy software works as well as the company claims in small boats, let alone that it can produce them more efficiently. And the Navy is still only in the initial stages of figuring out how it might use robot vessels.
But if you buy the premise that the U.S. only has a short window to prepare for a war over Taiwan, then the Pentagon needs to try something different and lean hard into buying autonomous vessels, said Whitney Jones, who until September was a deputy manager of a Navy program working to strengthen the maritime industrial base. “The risks of not moving forward very aggressively into this space are far greater than the risk of pursuing it,” she said.
If Saronic is guilty of a louder brand of Silicon Valley-style hype than typically seen in the shipbuilding industry, it may be that it’s necessary to get the Pentagon to put up the money to realize the potential of autonomous ships, said Craig Hooper, a national security and maritime consultant.
“Without having a fleet of vessels that they can further develop their technology on, they’re nothing. They’re just a builder of glorified fishing boats that you can’t fish off of,” said Hooper.
Mavrookas grew up near the Jersey shore beach town of Asbury Park, with no particular interest in the sea. As a teenager he bused tables and washed dishes in the family business, a chophouse started by his grandfather, an immigrant from Greece. Mavrookas went to Rutgers to study computer science. “My primary goal was to not go back and work in the restaurant,” he said.
Then, during his junior year, 9/11 happened. Mavrookas enlisted in the Navy and served 11 years as a SEAL. He spent five years in Team Six, the service’s elite special missions unit, pursuing militants in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Mavrookas left the military in 2015 after the birth of his first child, ground down from eight overseas deployments. He intended to walk away for good. He earned an MBA at Wharton and spent almost four years working at Vista Equity Partners, billionaire Robert Smith’s software-focused private-equity powerhouse. Mavrookas mastered Vista’s playbook on how to acquire and improve enterprise software companies, but he started to wonder about the value of what he was doing. Seven years out from the SEALs, “I was missing that purpose, that mission. What difference am I making?”
In 2022, when Anduril and Palantir had proven that upstarts could beat entrenched incumbents to win lucrative Pentagon contracts, Mavrookas decided he would follow suit and start a defense tech company.
He zeroed in on autonomy, where he believed the Navy was lagging. Many of the players already in the field were teams of a traditional boat builder grafting on software from another company. With cofounders Doug Lambert, an engineer who’d previously worked at Liquid Robotics, government contracting expert Rob Lehman, and Vibhav Altekar, who’d developed autonomy software at Anduril, they developed a plan to bring everything under one roof and design small autonomous boats with an eye towards mass manufacturability.
Mavrookas claims Saronic has developed best in class autonomy – he says they’ve demonstrated the ability for a single operator to control up to two dozen boats simultaneously. With its command software Echelon, a user can select from a menu of boats to plot a course for one on a map, set a squadron to follow a leader, or define an area that a team of boats will autonomously search. With a click of a mouse, the user can check a boat’s camera feed, or scan vital signs like engine oil levels and coolant temperature.
The company has been putting its boats through their paces in the busy ports of Galveston, Texas, and Newport Beach, Virginia, running them out through heavy traffic to the open ocean. “Most times when we run these missions, there’s zero manual interventions,” said Altekar.
But some in the industry say Saronic is talking a bigger game than it can back up.
Richard Byno, vice president at the competing autonomous boat builder Eureka Naval Craft, said that, to his knowledge, there’s been no public or third-party testing showing that any of the small autonomous boat developers have developed two key capabilities for real-world military us: an ability to maintain communications links in heavy seas, where high waves can block transmissions of masts low to the water, or to operate when signals are jammed.
“It’s fine when you’re running in the bay, but when you get out there and you get to a sea state, that’s another challenge,” said Byno. “You start jamming these little things, they’re not going to survive.”
Saronic says that it has validated that its equipment functions under those conditions and that it’s being 100% honest with the public. “We do not exaggerate our technology or performance,” spokeswoman Erin Pace wrote.
The Navy declined to answer questions about Saronic or discuss the capabilities of the autonomous vessels it’s testing.
“If the accidents aren’t happening, then you’re moving too slow.”
Reports of accidents in Navy testing this summer off the coast of California have also raised doubts about the maturity of the technology. A BlackSea vessel under tow suddenly turned on and flipped the boat that was pulling it, throwing the captain of the boat into the water. And BlackSea and Saronic vessels collided when the engine of one stalled, according to Reuters.
“We have not had an accident or a safety incident that has been the fault of our platforms,” said Mavrookas. At any rate, mishaps are how they’ll learn the limits of the technology and improve, he argued. “If the accidents aren’t happening, then you’re moving too slow.”
The company has a multipronged strategy to produce ships more cheaply and quickly. A big part is making them radically simpler – Marauder only has seven major components, Mavrookas claims — and a laser focus on manufacturability and modularity in the design stage.
Simpler also helps with another part of the equation: widening the pool of workers they can hire in an industry struggling with shortages of skilled labor. Morgan says he’s producing clearer work instructions modeled on IKEA furniture manuals.
And workers will labor in factories Morgan has designed to be “high, white and bright,” showing off the spotless glossy floor of the Corsair factory on a video tour. “We want people to be excited about where they work.” Helping build that excitement: every worker gets equity in the company.
Abig part of whether Saronic will succeed lies in the military working out how to handle “the basic care and feeding” of large numbers of autonomous vessels, said Hooper. There’s a long way to go.
“Where are you going to dock ’em? Where are you going to maintain them? How are you going to get them long distances to where they’re needed?” How will they even come alongside a tanker for refueling at sea, a maneuver that can result in crashes. “All of these basic things haven’t been figured out.”
Another big question is how well all the additional electronics and sensors will hold up to corrosive salt and rough seas, and what the loss rate will be from normal wear and tear, as well as other kinds of abuse the robot vessels might have to endure. “People fuck with ocean research buoys,” said Hooper. “Or you just have seals that are like, oh, cool, I’m going to sit on this and break it.”
Mavrookas believes Saronic’s strong VC backing is a trump card, but he’s also counting on federal support. There are multiple bills moving through Congress to speed up defense acquisitions and boost shipbuilding, including a 25% tax credit for investments in shipyards.
“Ship building is a multi-decade sport.”
Across the road from Saronic’s Louisiana shipyard is a similar-sized operation owned by the local small boat builder Metal Shark. It’s eying the same opportunities and has developed an autonomous boat for the Marine Corps. CEO Chris Allard is sanguine over his competitor’s arrival – “you don’t get to choose your neighbor.”
Allard is bemused by the recent surge of VC interest in shipbuilding, but he wonders if they have a clear idea of how much time and money it will take to change the labor intensive industry, and how quickly government support could vanish under a different administration.
“Ship building is a multi-decade sport. If it retreats back to even something remotely close to what it has been for the last 40 years, that’s going to be an interesting discussion.”
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