The great startup-prime team-up continues in full force.
Shipbuilding giant HII and manufacturing robotics startup GrayMatter Robotics inked a deal on Monday to bring AI-powered robotics to the most unsexy parts of the shipbuilding process—like surface prep, grinding, coating, and inspection—with the goal of speeding up the lethargic pace of building new Navy vessels.
Factory fun: GrayMatter, based in Los Angeles and founded in 2020, bills itself as a physical AI “factory superintelligence” company focused on the most mundane and labor-intensive of manufacturing and maintenance tasks.
- The company integrates its AI software—trained on “the largest data set when it comes to manufacturing processes,” CEO Ariyan Kabir told Tectonic—with robotic cells on the factory floor.
- Operators can place a part in front of a 3D camera, let the system generate its own model and pathing, and then execute the process without much programming.
- It’s focused on typically manual tasks that require a lot of precision, like grinding, sanding, surface prepping, and coating.
Sinking ship: The rationale behind teaming up with HII—the country’s largest shipbuilder—is pretty simple.
“There has been a rapid decline in the availability of a skilled workforce in the US. Today, we are half a million skilled workers short, and that number is going to grow to almost 4M in the next seven years.” Kabir said. “Between World War Two until now, tonnage-wise, [looking at] the amount of ships the US has built, China has built more than that just in the last 12 months.”
HII-power: HII—the shipbuilding megaprime that makes everything from the nuclear-powered Ford-class aircraft carriers to the Columbia and Virginia-class nuclear subs and, increasingly, unmanned underwater and surface vehicles—is eying some startup spice to help turn the ship around.
- The company also teamed up with manufacturing robotics startup Path Robotics back in February to integrate Path’s physical AI—AI that’s deployed in physical machines and robotics rather than software—for welding into shipbuilding operations.
“Our shipbuilding throughput was up 14 percent in 2025 and we are looking for an additional 15 percent increase in 2026,” HII’s EVP for maritime systems, Eric Chewning, said in a statement. “By working with new partners like [GrayMatter Robotics], we can further augment our workforce and speed up US Navy shipbuilding production.”
GrayMatter’s Kabir couldn’t confirm which programs the company’s working on with HII to start, but, in past work, “we were doing this grinding project on nuclear submarine reactor components,” he said. “We brought down a nine-hour grinding operation to only one and a half hours.”
Friends in the factory: GrayMatter is part of a growing group of new-age manufacturing and robotics companies entering the shipyard—including Gecko Robotics’ partnerships with a few US Navy prime component suppliers, Hadrian’s submarine-focused Factory 4 in Alabama, and Path’s partnership with HII—but Kabir says they’re all on the same team.
“We’re all very complimentary, and often we share common customers. In the physical [world], the market is so big, and the space is so broad, and there are so many different needs,” he said. “We need more companies to come forward much more rapidly with complementary capabilities. That’s how we can solve the problem at a much faster pace as a collective industry, as opposed to each of us focusing on our own niche.”