If 2025 was the year of the BFB (big f*cking boat), it looks like 2026 might end up being the year of the EBFB (even bigger f*cking boat).
Yesterday, autonomous surface vessel (ASV) company HavocAI announced that it’s teaming up with Hanwha Defense USA (the US subsidiary of the Korean defense giant) to build a 200-foot-long drone boat.
The mega-ASV will be built out of Hanwha’s shipyard—likely the Philly Shipyard in (you guessed it) Philadelphia, PA.
“The Department of War has sent a clear demand signal to the shipbuilding industry: we need more boats, faster, with more capabilities, for less money,” HavocAI Co-Founder and CEO Paul Lwin said in a statement. “Partnerships like this – pairing a leading-edge technology with an established global infrastructure – are exactly how we achieve that goal.”
According to a HavocAI spokesperson, Hanwha will build the vessel, and HavocAI will handle the autonomy stack. Notably, Hanwha was one of the investors in HavocAI’s $85M round back in October.
Prime-startup partnerships FTW.
If it floats: If you read Tectonic, you know about HavocAI. And if you haven’t been paying attention (or were just pretending to), here’s a quick overview:
- The startup was founded in early 2024 and had boats in the water within a year.
- They build a range of USVs—from the 14-foot Rampage to a 100-foot vessel built with HI-based R&D firm PacMar.
- The HavocAI team has made some friends in high places—in addition to PacMar, they’ve also inked partnerships with Lockheed Martin, radar company Tocaro Blue, SAIC, and Metal Shark (recently acquired by Magnet Defense).
- The company has raised a total of $97.2M, according to Pitchbook data, most recently that sweet, sweet $85M.
- And their kit seems to work—last fall, they won the Army’s xTech Pacific competition with their 14-foot Rampage and 42-foot KaiKoa vessels.
Scale up: The 200-ish foot category is quite a hot one for autonomous vessels these days.
- Back in July, the Navy launched a solicitation for the MASC program—looking for vessels that look a whole heck of a lot like the one Havoc and Hanwha are promising. (FWIW: Havoc told Tectonic that “production [of this vessel] will be pursuant to the U.S. Government’s MASC solicitation program.”
- The Big Beautiful Bill (throwback) allocated a whole $2.1B to medium and large USVs.
And a whole bunch of our defense tech friends have jumped on the big drone boat bandwagon. To name a few: 8VC maritime darling Saronic is working on a 180-foot vessel called Marauder, and startup Blue Water Autonomy was founded to build a 100-150-foot autonomous vessel.
The bigger the better, it would seem.
Built better: The Havoc spokesperson said that they chose the 200-foot size “based on requirements to carry specific containers while meeting range and speed specifications” and that the vessel is “designed for maritime domain awareness and sea power projection operations.”
We asked whether the spec calculus had changed at all in the wake of the new National Security Strategy and the Trump administration’s focus on the Western hemisphere—to date, a lot of the “big boat” talk has been centered around the Indo-Pacific.
“The U.S. Navy operates large ships in the Atlantic as well, and this vessel is perfectly suited for maritime domain awareness and sea power projection in multiple theaters, including operations we’ve conducted in the Western hemisphere,” they said.
The vessel is already in development, but the spokesperson declined to share an exact timeline for when it would be ready or how much each ship will cost.
Fingers crossed the answers are “soon” and “cheaper than the other stuff.”