Joining other defense technology startups that are leveraging Palantir Technologies’ [PLTR] software manufacturing platform, Vatn Systems on Wednesday said they have partnered with the company to help as it transitions to production.
The two-year-old Rhode Island-based startup is developing autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) for defense and commercial uses. Vatn has been testing its AUVs in military exercises, including with the Navy, and said it has a dozen vehicles with government customers and more on order.
The partnership with Palantir will accelerate production, Vatn said.
“What it allows us to do is build, basically, a digital twin of our entire manufacturing process that allows us to better understand on every level what’s happening,” Nelson Mills, co-founder and CEO of Vatn, told Defense Daily on Monday ahead of the announcement. “Like, where are some supply chain hiccups? Where along our production are we having assembly issues? What points of failure are we experiencing? And to understand that in one central platform where all our data comes in and allows us to better respond to that and scale our manufacturing.”
Palantir’s artificial intelligence-powered Warp Speed technology is “unique” to the market and offers users a “competitive edge,” Mills said. The manufacturing platform features machine learning that will allows companies to “understand and improve your processes and automate it,” he said.
Last month Palantir announced partnerships with startups Epirus, Red Cat [RCAT], Saildrone, Saronic, and Ursa Major, and non-traditional defense company Sierra Nevada Corp. to deploy Warp Speed to bolster their manufacturing, optimize maintenance, and improve other aspects of their operations. Palantir has similar arrangements with Anduril Industries, L3Harris Technologies [LHX], and others.
Vatn last fall announced a $13 million seed round to expand its team. Among others, investors include Lockheed Martin [LMT], RTX [RTX], and Science Applications International Corp. [SAIC] (Defense Daily, Nov. 12, 2024). At that time, the company had 18 employees and now has 37, Mills said.
Skelmir 6, a six-inch diameter AUV that looks like a torpedo and weighs between 50 and 60 pounds, is Vatn’s first product. The AUV is priced to be expendable, but is retrievable, and can carry a payload up to 20 pounds with a range of 20 nautical miles. The company is planning to introduce additional products with longer ranges.
Vatn is working with various government customers and “all of them have a clear pathway toward a larger program,” Mills said.