Some people like to take things slow. Other people—like Mal Crease—prefer everything at full throttle. The founder and CEO of USV company Kraken Technology came into defense from high-speed boat racing in 2020, and has brought the same obsession with speed and performance that once helped him break world records to the world of unmanned maritime systems.
Crease and his team stand by a pretty simple formula: Keep your head down, build solid platforms, and make sure they can go really, really fast. And it seems to be working.
The UK-based company:
- Has been backed by the NATO Innovation fund and the UK’s NSSIF, as well as Superangel (at an unspecified amount)
- Has boats deployed with the UK MoD, as well as on NATO exercises
- Just opened a new facility and now has the capacity to churn out about 2,000 vessels a year
- Inked a partnership deal with German shipbuilding giant NVL last month
- Announced they’re teaming up with Applied Intuition last week to speed up autonomy testing and integration
So far, they’ve got three core vessels:
- The K3 Scout: Their cheap and cheerful autonomous speedboat (the most popular model), which 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).
- The K4 Manta: A wild-looking, stealthy uncrewed surface-subsurface vehicle (USSV), built for both fast surface transit and covert submerged missions. L3Harris worked with them on this.
- The K5 Kraken: A concept-stage 15-meter-long speedboat with optional crew and room for bigger weapons.
In other words, it’s been a busy couple of years. With all this going on, and with DSEI kicking off in London this week, Tectonic sat down with Crease to chat about his road to defense, the importance of unmanned vessels, and where he sees his company—and the industry—going.
Note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Welcome, Mal. Can you tell me about your path into defense?
I’ve been in the maritime industry for 25 years. I started in 2001 in offshore racing with Sunseeker and was involved in various iterations of high-performance boats and businesses, including XS Marine Group.
In 2012, I came off the back of a nearly four-year stretch with Formula One and launched a company called Vector Racing in partnership with Martini. We became the Vector Martini Racing Team. We raced successfully under those colors through 2016, and in 2017 we moved across from Martini and Porsche to Jaguar Land Rover Group.
Over that period, we set multiple world speed and endurance records. We won championships. We broke the electric world record. We basically went faster, pushing boundaries and limits in the maritime space.
In 2020, COVID hit. We had done prototyping projects for defense clients and contractors. When COVID hit, racing dried up. The defense industry kept knocking with requests, and a combination of things in 2020–2021 made us pivot almost exclusively into defense—particularly with what was going on in Ukraine, where YouTube videos showed fast boats going into the side of capital ships. We were fast boat guys, through and through. We knew how to build the platforms that could go fast and achieve certain operational capabilities.
So in 2020, we formally pivoted into defense and have been in that space ever since.
What’s happened since then? How has Kraken grown? And how has your vision for the company changed?
That’s a big question. I’ll try to keep it brief. We spent the first 12 months just understanding the industry. We obviously weren’t from defense, and it’s not an industry where you want to bluff. So we surrounded ourselves with people that really understood the industry—a lot of former tier one operators—and began to look at the small boat space, which historically has been dwarfed by big Navy, big ships. Small boats have always been seen slightly as second-class citizens.
We spent 12 months understanding what the small boat space looked like, who the players were, where the gaps existed, and where we could make a difference.
In 2022 we started work on two platforms, the K4 Manta and the K5 Gunship, both of which we had identified as gaps in the market. We picked up our first contract with SOCOM, which is an R&D program for Manta, in 2023. We raised money, developed our product portfolio in different directions, and the more we understood the market, the more we saw gaps.
Two things resonated with us. First, the future—where a lot of early-stage businesses focus. What’s next? What’s the next big thing? You can spend an awful lot of time developing products that never see the light of day, cost an awful lot of money, and never really reach production. We did some of that early on.
But at the same time, there was a clear message from operators: all this R&D and future tech is fantastic, but there’s a requirement here and now that nobody’s filling. That here and now became the K3 Scout platform: high-performance, low-cost, highly versatile, modular. For whatever reason, this platform had never been built successfully—not at scale, not at an attritable price, not with modularity and interchangeable payloads.
So we listened carefully to the advice we were getting and focused on getting one product right that was relevant now.
We were running parallel tracks: the future tech, what’s going to be relevant in the next 24–36 months, really pushing the envelope with the Manta platform and Saber platform. But we also focused on getting one product right here and now, which was the Scout platform, the “truck.” There are now four sizes of Scout in development, all of which carry the same DNA: high performance, low cost.
Why unmanned? Why small? And do you plan to go bigger?
Why unmanned? We took a lot of early learning cues from what’s been going on in the air. If you look at the UAV market and how it’s exploded in the last five years, clearly, to achieve scale, you have to look at unmanned, uncrewed capabilities. There are just not enough people to go around. If the mission is to keep people alive and out of danger, then sticking a highly experienced pilot in every one of these platforms is counterproductive. We’ve been listening to the buying signals coming out of various points, and there is a general shift towards unmanned. It keeps costs down and risk to human life at a minimum.
The focus on small—well, that’s what we do. We’ve always stuck to our swim lane. We are small, high-performance boat experts. That’s what we do. There are lots of companies out there that do small boats that aren’t very fast. That’s fine. We’re not trying to cut across them; We’re trying to offer something with a serious point of difference.
One of the major turning points we’ve seen in the last three years is that speed has now become a strategic advantage. Historically, speed was not particularly necessary or required. But with the advent of different conflicts and different approaches, speed has suddenly become a much more meaningful strategic advantage, and that’s what we do really well.
The stuff we’re doing at the moment with Kraken is relatively slow speed compared to some of our historical activities. And small boats do speed well. The bigger the boat, the bigger the weight, generally, the slower it goes. If you want to achieve high speed, north of 50 knots—which is generally where we sit—you need smaller units.
And smaller units are quicker to build, which facilitates rapid scaling. It’s much more difficult to scale bigger boats. The bigger you get, the more complex the equation. The harder it is to achieve the kind of scale that certain programs like Replicator are implying they want. At one stage, there were reports of requirements for up to 10,000 boats. You want to build 10,000 very big boats? That is a massive engineering undertaking. Never in the history of boats has anyone required 10,000 boats—not even 1,000 boats, probably not even 100 boats since World War Two.
So from day one, our four key drivers were performance, price, scalability, and modularity. How do you repurpose these cheap platforms and reuse them for different missions? That’s achieved through modularity.
As for bigger: it’s an interesting one. Last week, we established a major joint venture with NVL. They are arguably the premier shipbuilder in the world—a great German institution, five generations, yards all over the world, unparalleled expertise in big ships. They have the ability to scale, the know-how, the understanding, the skill sets, the supply chain resilience, the supply chain muscle. And they do big ships. We, on the other hand, do small fast boats.
There is a sweet spot in the middle of those two companies, which sits in and around what we’re now calling mid-size. We think we can do some very interesting things with NVL in relation to this mid-range, 75 to 150 feet. In fact, there is already work going on, and we have some very interesting thoughts in development in that mid-size space, in partnership with NVL and with companies that would benefit from that size of craft with particular payload requirements and containerized movement at high speed.
Where do you see your craft—both small and larger—most needed?
We are currently on contract and selling to the UK MoD, NATO, Europe, and the US. 2025 has been significant. We’ve opened two new facilities, plus the partnership with NVL. We have the capacity to build 2,000 units a year. We now have our own facility in Hamburg, alongside three facilities in the UK, multiple options in the US, and the ability to leverage NVL’s yards outside of Germany. So we essentially have global bandwidth now for manufacturing.
Alongside that, the product itself, the Scout, is basically akin to an automotive CKD platform. It can be shipped in a box and assembled locally in a couple of days by semi-skilled labor. So it’s the automotive model, boat in a box, which has been proving highly successful.
We have achieved multiple contracts this year with multiple governments. We’ve already sold more than 100 units this year. That number could be significantly higher moving into the end of the year, and certainly into 2026. The pipeline for what we’re doing is becoming extremely open.
Our approach has been to keep it real. We come from a racing background. We understand what it means to have a product that works. If your product doesn’t work, there’s no point in turning up at a start line, because you’re not going to finish. So we have spent a lot of time getting these products right. We won’t commit to something that we can’t deliver, and we won’t put product into the hands of operators that hasn’t proven itself, tried and tested.
The market is global now. It’s gone from a few small, isolated pockets to the whole world looking at this as a solution. Because, quite frankly, when it comes to patrolling certain areas, big ships just can’t cover the ground. You need scale, and the only way you can do that is with smaller, high-performance, low-cost platforms.
So we’ve seen an explosive uptake in interest in what we’re doing. Fundamentally, it’s about approaching it in a clever way. We’ve tried to partner with the best at every opportunity. We’ve tried to learn from the best. We listen to the advice of people who really understand how this product is going to be deployed and what the requirements really look like.
The success of the product in recent exercises—TFX up in the Baltics—we were running complex missions there in horrific sea states for extended periods of time very successfully. Ultimately, in this business, we’ve seen a lot of smoke and mirrors. You’ll have seen some of the recent articles in that respect. That’s not what we do. We focus entirely on getting the product as operationally good as we can. That performance, reliability, and capability is selling itself.
We’ve never marketed the Kraken product. We minimize our use of social media. We’re not a company that shouts about it. We prefer to stay relatively discreet in our approach. And I appreciate that here I am on a media interview. Sometimes you have to do this, to set the record straight, which is what today was about. But we prefer to let the product do the talking and the operators do the talking.
What worries you most about the maritime autonomy space?
False pretenders. It doesn’t worry me, I wouldn’t say it worries me. It more irritates me. In my mind, this is about protecting the operators. It’s about making sure that the operators have the best kit, which keeps them alive. And if people are putting product into the market that doesn’t work and is not capable and is heavily reliant on things that don’t work—software, hardware, bad design—from our perspective, that is not the right approach. If we want to save lives and ensure the safety of the operators, nothing worries me as such. It’s more irritation at companies that think they can just come into this space with no prior experience and throw money at the problem, which isn’t necessarily always the solution.
Do you think the US and Western allies can meet the need for a very large hybrid fleet by 2027?
At the moment, I think it will be a significant challenge. The reason we’re working with established companies like NVL is because if anyone’s going to do it, we’re going to do it. You can’t just build this from the ground up in two years with a product that works. You’ve seen it recently in articles—there are entities that can’t even make small boats work, and yet they’re claiming they’re going to make very big boats work. I would rather put my money on companies that have built big boats and actually have a fighting chance of making something work successfully, because they know what they’re doing.
So I think that depends on which region you’re talking about and which players you’re talking about. For the time being, we just focus on what we do and doing it to the best of our ability. We don’t spend too much time worrying about what everyone else is doing, because we know that at the moment, arguably, we have the best products in the world at a price point people can afford, and that is carrying through without us having to say very much.
So, can the US and allies hit the requirement by 2027? I would say, look at what’s happened in the last two years and how much progress has or hasn’t been made, and we’re halfway through that time frame. You’ve got another two years to figure it out. I would say, if anyone can, we can, which is why we’re doing things the way we’re doing it. But the flip side of that is, there’s still not clarity on how big the requirement actually is. There needs to be a lot more clarity on what’s required, when it’s required by, and what that really looks like. At the moment, I would say it’s going to be a big challenge.
If you had one piece of advice for founders trying to build a company in defense tech or get into defense tech, what would it be?
Always be realistic. Focus on the here and now. Partner wisely and just keep focused. I think the team is everything. You’ve got to have the right team, the right attitude, and the right approach. You’ve got to think very cleverly and outside the box and keep it real.