Well, jeez. We knew maritime autonomy was all the rage, but the US government (and a certain Texas-based drone producer) are getting mega-serious about it.
Yesterday, not-so-tiny USV startup Saronic announced that it’s been awarded a production OTA under the US Navy’s Medium Unmanned Surface Vessel (MUSV) Marketplace for Marauder, its 180-foot autonomous ship.
Under the agreement, Saronic will deliver 10 Marauders at roughly $40M a pop, according to the Navy. That brings the total contract value to $400M, for the mathematically challenged among us.
The service says it expects to receive the first Marauders by the end of FY27.
The super-award comes after Saronic (and Marauder) was down-selected back in June for at-sea testing by the Navy. According to the company, “Over eight days of continuous, 24/7 operations, Marauder completed more than 140 test scenarios without failure.”
- The idea was to test whether the USV was actually autonomous, and the trial “included autonomously tracking and maneuvering around a variety of vessels, as well as a battery of passive-perception tests.”
“Marauder went from initial design to on-the-water in under a year, and this evaluation demonstrated that the platform holds up under the Navy’s own toughest testing,” Saronic CEO and Co-Founder Dino Mavrookas said in a statement. “We’ve now flipped our third Marauder hull, with several more moving through the production line behind it.”
Sea babies: Now you probably don’t need a refresher on Saronic at this point, but we’ll do a quick one for the uninitiated.
- The company was founded out of 8VC’s Build program back in 2022 and has created a bit of a drone boat empire since.
- They make a whole range of unmanned vessels—from the bitty six-foot Spyglass up to the 60-foot Cipher and 180-foot Marauder (the subject of this particular contract).
- Marauder was unveiled after the company bought up Louisiana-based Gulf Craft shipbuilders last year, and the company builds these bad boys out of the company’s Franklin, LA shipyard.
- And this isn’t Saronic’s first rodeo with the Navy—in December 2025, Saronic announced that it had been awarded a $392M Other Transaction Agreement (OTA) to supply the US Navy with a bunch of its 24-foot-long Corsair ASVs.
And those government dollars ain’t the only cash Saronic has in the bank—the company has raised a total of $2.59B in VC funding, most recently a $1.75B Series D at a $9.25B valuation.
Out at sea: A lot of that cash money is going towards building out the company’s flagship shipyard-of-the-future, Port Alpha, in Brownsville, TX.
- Operations are set to kick off there in 2028, and the first phase of the project (850 acres) will have up to 150,000 gross tons of shipbuilding capacity and the ability to produce vessels up to 850 feet long.
- The first vessel set to roll off the line at Port Alpha is actually not very unmanned at all—earlier this month, the US Navy tapped Saronic to build a prototype of the service’s next Landing Craft, Utility (LCU) out of the Texas shipyard.
But this Marauder win is very much going back to Saronic’s autonomous roots. According to the company, during those trials Marauder was able to “detect, track, and follow other vessels using only its passive onboard sensors, without reliance on active radar.”
“This capability is regarded as one of the more difficult technical challenges in autonomous maritime systems,” the company wrote in a blog post. “Every scenario in the evaluation was conducted with the same platform that the Navy has now put under contract, with the trials completed back-to-back in continuous operations to demonstrate the vessel’s real-world capabilities.”
