Just as we’re starting to gear up for the Tectonic European Defense Summit this winter (teaser, hehe), it looks like everyone and their mom is making bets on the Old Continent.
This morning, USV giant Saildrone announced that they’re officially expanding their presence in Europe with a new, larger Copenhagen office and production in the Netherlands, Norway, and Poland.
“We have great traction with our European partners [and] NATO partners, and we believe the need and market are very significant in Europe,” CEO Rich Jenkins told Tectonic. “So, we are responding to that [by] increasing the size of the business, and we are doing local manufacturing for local customers.”
Worth noting that Danish sovereign fund EIFO (Export and Investment Fund of Denmark) led a $60M funding round for Saildrone last May, and the company then opened an office in Denmark. Sounds like that year-and-a-half-long Euro trip went very well.
Ahoy matey: Now, y’all know Saildrone.
The company was founded all the way back in 2012 to build sailboat-like drone boats (hence the name) that are really good at things like persistent, long-term monitoring of big ol’ bodies of water.
- Fun fact: The company actually started out in climate and oceanographic research—the super-low noise profile of the boats means they’re good for monitoring things like fish populations. They’re also good for sneaking up on adversaries—hence the expansion into defense.
- The USVs come in a few different flavors: The 23-foot Explorer, 33-foot Voyager, and 65-foot Surveyor. Earlier this year, they also unveiled a big ol’ 250-ton, engine-powered drone boat called Spectre, built with Lockheed Martin.
- All of these are (traditionally) equipped with high-powered radar and cameras that can cover thousands of square miles every day at a “fraction of the cost” of crewed boats.
- The bigger vessels can also carry weaponry (like, for example, the LMC group project, Spectre), but Jenkins was careful to point out that this is the customer’s domain—they build the platform.
Eurotrip: Since that $60M funding round (and the opening of their European office in Denmark), they’ve been pretty busy on the continent.
- The company carried out a trial with four Voyagers for the Danish Armed Forces starting last summer—according to Jenkins, they did four voyages over six months and maintained 93 percent uptime, even in the Baltic winter. Per Jenkins, normal ships only have about 35-40 percent uptime.
- Those four Voyagers also participated in NATO’s Task Force X experiment in the Gulf of Finland and western Baltic last summer. Saildrone’s boats essentially acted as the detection layer, cueing faster unmanned vessels to investigate contacts.
- They’ve also worked on undersea infrastructure protection and North Atlantic subsea mapping. All very important considering, uhm, certain grey-zone tactics.
Shades of grey: Jenkins and European Managing Director Robert Kleist said that this performance with the Danes has seriously piqued interest from other European countries. There’s also the whole major threat from Russia and other adversaries thing.
“We believe the need in Europe is extreme, given the threats we see from their neighbors, basically,” Jenkins said. “Risks to critical infrastructure, undersea infrastructure, cables, pipelines, offshore energy, combined with nefarious activities such as sanctions evasion, shadow fleet intelligence gathering—[that] needs urgent and rapid, persistent presence in the Gulf, North Sea and the Arctic…[These threats] will only continue to increase in the coming years.”
“It is a strategic and deliberate location to put our office [in Copenhagen],” Kleist added. “We see a growing demand, especially from the Nordics and Northern Europe, for our services, filling in the gaps of the gray ships for maritime domain awareness.”
- The European expansion will primarily focus on Spectre and Surveyor—Spectre will be built at Van Der Valk Shipyard in the Netherlands, while “the next generation of the Saildrone Surveyor will be produced at Umoe Mandal in Norway.”
- Wings for the boats will be produced at Southern Spars in Poland. “There are only a few people in the world who can make these things, and they’re one of the best,” Jenkins said.
- Kleist says they will also source sensors and other payloads from European producers, and will adjust based on customer demand. HQ will be in Denmark, but they’ll export to the entire continent.
- Surveyor V3 (the new version they’re building in Europe) “will be a new and improved version of the surveyor V2,” Jenkins told Tectonic over text.
“V3 is generally improved on V2, offering almost twice the speed, able to cruise at 12 knots and sprint at 16 knots. It also has a larger fuel load and longer range than V2,” he wrote. “V3 [is] optimised for faster mapping performance and sprint for interdiction capability in ISR mode.”
“I think what we need to ensure security in European waters is persistent presence because the observation and persistent monitoring of threats we see [is] preparation for any potential kinetic fight,” Jenkins said in our interview. “I think Saildrone is uniquely experienced and uniquely positioned to provide that service.”
