Looks like Saronic really is trying to build the shipyard of the future. Yesterday, the unmanned surface vessel (USV) company and 8VC darling announced that it’s acquired Gulf Craft, a shipbuilder on the Louisiana coast.
The company also unveiled a new 150-foot medium USV (MUSV) called Marauder, which will be prototyped out of Gulf Craft’s facilities.
“This lets us get into larger ship building construction immediately,” Saronic CEO Dino Mavrookas told Tectonic. “It lets us build now while we also plan for the future.”
Mavrookas said Saronic plans to invest $250M in Gulf Craft over the next 3–4 years.
Port Alpha: Gulf Craft isn’t Saronic’s first shipyard-related announcement of the year. In February, the company announced it would use much of its $600M Series C to build “Port Alpha,” a futuristic shipyard to produce autonomous vessels that Mavrookas told reporters would open in less than five years.
Details on the plan have remained fairly scant, and the team has yet to announce a location for the super-shipyard. But Mavrookas said that the Gulf Craft acquisition will not impact the Port Alpha plan or timeline—in fact, he said, it might help speed it up.
“This is going to inform the decisions that we make with Port Alpha,” he said, “It’s going to form the initial construction that we’re going to build in Port Alpha.” When completed, he said that the two facilities would work in parallel.
Meet in the middle: Mavrookas said that Saronic decided to build Marauder out of the facility because the US Navy desperately needs it. The vessels have been designed by Saronic from the ground up to close the Navy’s autonomous capability gaps, he said, especially in the Indo-Pacific.
- Marauder is in active development and Saronic plans to have the vessels in the water within 12 months.
- While Mavrookas declined to give a unit cost, he said the boats will be “very economical so they can be adopted at scale.”
Ahead of the curve: Saronic doesn’t have a contract for Marauder yet, Mavrookas said, but they expect it will be critical to the Navy building out its dream hybrid fleet.
“We’re building things ahead of government contracts,” he said, “We’re building very, very quickly…because we know that the Navy needs these things now.”
Shipbuilding is an expensive game, though. Scaling up production of these (and all of Saronic’s) vessels will require even more capital, Mavrookas added. The company plans to release two additional products later this year.