Our drone boat friends over in Fareham are certainly having quite the week.
Yesterday, everyone’s favorite new age defense company (Anduril) announced that it’s teaming up with UK-founded Kraken Technology Group to bring the company’s “proven family of small, high-performance, mass-producible USVs” to the US.
The announcement comes just a day after Rheinmetall—that tiny German startup—said that its joint venture with Kraken had started churning out the startup’s K3 Scout USVs in Germany.
“It’s just been such an incredible couple of months for us in so many ways, with contract wins, and now this,” Kraken founder and CEO Mal Crease told Tectonic. “[We’re in] a concrete position in the US—we’re a thing now, you know?”
Brits spreading around the world, and fast. Nice to see them getting back to their roots.
Splish splash: Y’all have heard of Kraken. And if you haven’t, you’re not reading Tectonic closely enough.
The company was founded by former speedboat racer (not a joke) Crease back in 2020, and since then has built a mini-USV-empire from across the pond.
The company has made a name for itself with a few different flavors:
- K3 Scout: A speedboat-like USV that comes in three sizes—Medium (8m long, 600kg payload, and top speed of 55 knots), Heavy (12m long, 2,000kg payload), and Max (18.6m long, 10,000kg payload, and a range of 2,000 nautical miles).
- K4 Manta: Kraken’s stealthy uncrewed surface-subsurface vehicle (USSV), built for both fast surface transit and covert submerged missions. They partnered with L3Harris on it.
- K5 Kraken: A 40-foot vessel with optional crew and heavy weaponization payloads—it can carry 1500 kilos at 55 knots. Crease said to think of it as an “evolution” of the Scout Heavy.
The Scout is by far the company’s most popular model—it costs around £250,000 ($338,100) per unit, and the company sold well over 100 of them last year, according to Crease.
- The Scout (and Kraken) won a £12.3M Project Beehive contract with the Royal Navy earlier this year.
- The company also scored a $49M cap OTA with the United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) for these super-speedy USVs.
Holding hands: This partnership with Anduril basically cements Kraken’s position in the US. The two companies will work together on two vessels: The K5 Kraken and a new, bigger vessel called the K7 Sabre.
- According to Crease, the K7 will be about 84 feet long—safely into the mUSV category—and designed for long-range transit and heavy payloads.
K5 is currently at the production prototype stage, Crease said, and deliveries will kick off in the next two months.
- Both models will be built by Anduril at shipyards in the US.
- Crease said that Anduril is helping out “on the autonomy, on the mission side, and on the integration of larger payloads.”
- Anduril will build, sustain, and support the US fleet, while Kraken will “continue a parallel production line [for allies], designing a distinct hull variant for allied operational requirements.”
Built to scale: The two companies say they’re building the K5 and K7 for the US Navy, which “needs small USVs that carry flexible payloads exceeding 1,000 lbs, sustain extended operations, and roll off production lines fast.”
- If you’re sitting there thinking, wait, hmmmmm, these sound a lot like they might work on a certain newly-unveiled maritime marketplace, you wouldn’t be wrong.
“Dominance at sea requires scale,” Anduril wrote in a statement. “Kraken’s platform expertise plus Anduril’s autonomy and domestic manufacturing deliver it.”