Let the age of super-charged drone boats begin. Unmanned surface vehicle (USV) maker Saildrone announced this morning that it entered a strategic partnership with software and data behemoth Palantir ($PLTR).
Saildrone will use Palantir’s technology up and down its stack, from manufacturing, to fleet operations, to managing autonomous assets. The company will use Palantir’s Warp Speed on the ops side and AI software for control on the battlefield.
“Leveraging Palantir’s sophisticated manufacturing and AI tools will allow us to streamline manufacturing and radically enhance fleet capabilities,” Saildrone CEO Richard Jenkins said in a statement. Five other companies including Epirus, Red Cat, and Saronic also announced today that they would use Palantir’s Warp Speed to boost production.
Set sail: Saildrone makes sailboat-like autonomous vessels that are great for maritime surveillance and information gathering. Fleets of the company’s USVs can help maintain visibility over huge swathes of water, like the Pacific Ocean or the Gulf of Mexico. Just last month, the company announced that the Navy would be deploying 20 Saildrone vessels as part of its anti-narcotics Operation Southern Spear. The wind- and solar-powered boats:
- Work very well alongside traditional, crewed vessels—they can operate like a forward observer, transmitting vital intelligence to the manned fleet.
- Have been used widely for climate and oceanographic research.
- Come in 3 sizes: the 23-foot Explorer, 33-foot Voyager, and 74-foot Surveyor.
- Are designed to last a long time at sea without crewed backup.
Project 2027: In case the lightbulb hasn’t gone off yet: these vessels would also be very, very useful in any potential conflict with China in the Indo-Pacific. As Washington (and the rest of the defense industry) grows increasingly worried about a potential invasion of Taiwan, demand for this kind of sea drone has skyrocketed.
Saildrone says that Palantir’s software will enable them to ramp up production and capabilities to meet that demand. Palantir’s AI-driven software will also fuse Saildrone’s existing dataset—collected over a decade of operation and nearly two million nautical miles sailed—with other sources to produce better maritime intelligence. If you were on a party boat anywhere near a Saildrone recently, consider this your warning.