It certainly seems like our friends in Rhode Island had some pretty ambitious New Year’s resolutions.
This morning, autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) company Vatn Systems announced in an exclusive release to Tectonic that it has acquired RI-based Crewless Marine to scale up its underwater acoustic sensing and processing capabilities.
Crewless will be fully folded into Vatn—co-founder Steve Bordonaro will become Vatn’s chief engineer for systems, and co-founder Philip Casper will join as director of acoustics.
“Acoustic sensing is fundamental to undersea warfare, and owning this capability end-to-end enables us to advance our mission while positioning us to expand into the harbor defense and environment monitoring markets,” Mills said in a statement.
While Vatn did not disclose the terms of the deal, Mills told Tectonic that they will take full ownership of Crewless and its contracts—including a SBIR with the Navy.
Looks like Mills and his team are wasting no time putting that $60M Series A to work.
Boom boom: If you’re a regular reader of Tectonic, you’ll be no stranger to Vatn. The company was founded back in 2023 and builds a torpedo-like underwater drone called the Skelmir that comes in two different flavors.
- The Skelmir S6: A 6-inch diameter version that can carry a 10-20lb payload and has a range of 20 nautical miles at up to 20 knots (23 mph).
- The Skelmir S12: A heftier 12-inch diameter AUV that can carry a 250lb payload and has a range of over 200 nautical miles at up to 30 knots (34.5 mph).
The good stuff: In case you haven’t quite caught on yet, these kinds of underwater drones would be super helpful, say, against a massive Chinese flotilla in the Indo-Pacific. And investors agree.
- In December, the company raised a $60M Series A led by BVVC with participation from some big ol’ defense giants like Lockheed Martin Ventures, Airbus Ventures, and Hanwha.
- RTX Ventures, Lockheed Martin Ventures, and In-Q-Tel all participated in the company’s $13M seed in 2024.
- The company also teamed up with little-known startup Palantir to scale manufacturing last April.
And they’ve put all this cash money to good use. In May, they opened up a new manufacturing facility in Rhode Island and, in December, Mills told Tectonic they’d be expanding into an even bigger and badder setup that could produce 2000 S12s and 2000 S6s a year.
Right on target: Mills said that Crewless’ sensors and processing capabilities will help Vatn “build homing and seeking sensors and other acoustic systems that … enhance mission capability and reduce supply chain risk for [their] customers.”
- For “kinetic missions,” Crewless’ acoustic tech helps with homing and seeking—basically making sure the torpedo drones can find and hit their targets.
- On the ISR side of things, the tech can listen for ships, subs, and other underwater vehicles—giving operators situational awareness.
And the two companies already know they play well together—Crewless has previously supplied sensors and processing capabilities to Vatn, and helped with homing during a “US military demonstration” (Mills’ words) last fall.
Clear as day: More than anything, Mills said that this buy-up gives his company much-needed control over its tech stack and supply chain—at this point, he said, the vehicles are roughly 75 percent Vatn products.
“This really allows us to be more price competitive and improve the performance by owning the full stack,” he said. “No part of the vehicle basically is a black box for us, right? We can do really integrated interesting things, [like] cross autonomy [and] signal processing for acoustics and navigation.”
And they don’t plan to stop here—Mills said they’re working on a full analysis of where it makes the most sense to buy up suppliers or build in-house (guessing that sweet, sweet Palantir Foundry helps).
“[We’re looking at the] key technology stacks that we need to own in-house to be most price competitive, move more quickly, be supply chain resilient and and really improve performance,” he said. “There are other identified areas—we’ll talk about those more as we announce more internal projects or acquisitions.”
Love a tease of things to come.