Welp, big ol’ week for our friends across the pond.
This morning, British maritime autonomy darling Kraken Technology announced that it’s raised a $175M Series B at a $1B valuation, which the company says will “accelerate Kraken’s rapid capability development and international manufacturing expansion.”
The round was led by DTCP with participation from the British Business Bank, NATO Innovation Fund (NIF), Rheinmetall, Inocea Group, HICO, Thesiger Capital Group, BOKA Capital, Supernova Invest, and Hakluyt Capital.
- Per Kraken, earlier investors including NIF, the UK’s National Security Strategic Investment Fund (NSSIF), and SmartCap, as well as Notion Capital and Speedinvest, have converted to equity.
“This significant funding round will accelerate Kraken’s global roll-out, enabling the deployment of hardened, reliable, mission-ready capabilities for NATO and its worldwide partners at an unprecedented scale in the maritime domain,” Kraken founder and CEO Mal Crease said in a statement.
Gotta say, pretty sick to drop a USV out of an A400 and raise $175M, all in a week.
Speedy quick: If you read Tectonic, you know Kraken.
The company was founded back in 2020 by Crease—a former speedboat racer—and since then has remained dead set on making boats that are hands-free and super-duper fast. They’ve got a few different models:
- K3 Scout: A speedboat-like USV that 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).
- K4 Manta: Kraken’s stealthy uncrewed surface-subsurface vehicle (USSV), built for both fast surface transit and covert submerged missions. They partnered with L3Harris on it.
- K5 Kraken: A 40-foot vessel with optional crew and heavy weaponization payloads—it can carry 1500 kilos at 55 knots. Think of it as an “evolution” of the Scout Heavy.
The Scout is their flagship—and what they dropped out of a plane the other day. They cost around £250,000 ($338,100) per unit, and the company sold well over 100 of them last year, according to Crease.
- The Scout (and Kraken) won a £12.3M Project Beehive contract with the Royal Navy earlier this year.
- The company also scored a $49M cap OTA with the United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) for these speedy little USVs.
- Per the company, its “platforms [are] now deployed in support of multiple ongoing conflicts.
BFFs: And they’ve made some pretty high-powered friends in the past couple of years.
- Back in April, the company teamed up with Anduril to bring the company’s “proven family of small, high-performance, mass-producible USVs” to the US.
- Also in April, Kraken and Rheinmetall announced that the prime would start producing the K3 Scout in Germany.
- They’ve also teamed up with Davie for production in Canada and have a joint venture with German maritime giant NVL.
And like most companies that raise a couple hundo mil, Kraken says that the name of the game from here is scale.
- The company plans to use the funding to ramp up production, especially internationally.
- Per Kraken, it is “soon to announce…partnerships in both the Middle East and Indo-Pacific regions.” Good to have friends in high places, like, everywhere.
“Kraken genuinely understands the unique challenges around high-sea-state robotic operations and swiftly responded to NATO requirements, delivering immediate ‘mission-first’ maritime capabilities to secure our waters, our shores, and our offshore installations,” DTCP partner Ole Aguirre said in a statement. “We have high confidence in Kraken and could not be more excited about the opportunities ahead of us.”