Saronic, a startup developing autonomous unmanned surface vessels, on Tuesday had its public coming out, disclosing a $55 million seed funding round and saying it is ready with products for the Navy.
Saronic was founded in September 2022, is based in Austin, Texas, has developed six-foot and 13-foot autonomous USVs, and is developing a third as part of its family of systems that can operate alone or in swarms in GPS- and communications-denied environments with an eye to any conflict with China.
“Saronic is a defense technology company, period,” Dino Mavrookas, co-founder and CEO of the venture-backed company, told Defense Daily last week during a virtual interview ahead of the Series A funding announcement. “Our mission is to redefine maritime superiority for the U.S. and its allies.”
The differentiator in Saronic’s approach to autonomous USVs is the tight integration upfront between vessel design, and the software and autonomy, all of which is developed in-house, to be able to manufacture at scale, Mavrookas said. The company is also focused on the missions and the related sensors so “we’re building that boat around the mission, not trying to build a mission around the boat,” he said.
It is not enough to have a “cool boat” and software code. He said manufacturing must be designed in at the start to build thousands of USVs, otherwise “You don’t move the needle in the maritime fight,” he said.
Despite being only a year old, Saronic is ready to participate in the Pentagon’s Replicator Initiative that aims to purchase autonomous, expandable all-domain drones by the thousands in the next 18 months to two years. Saronic’s first prototype was in the water four months ago and capabilities could be delivered immediately, Mavrookas said.
And the company can scale production in relatively short order.
“We are right down the middle of what Replicator is looking for,” Rob Lehman, co-founder and chief commercial officer of Saronic, said during the interview. “Autonomous attritable systems that can be delivered at scale.”
Lehman, nephew of President Ronald Reagan’s Navy Secretary John Lehman, retired from the Marine Corps as a Lt. Colonel and later worked at
Northrop Grumman [NOC], ManTech International, and led the maritime technology company Temeku Technologies, Inc.
Saronic is confident in its ability to quickly manufacture in large numbers because one of its first hires was the company’s head of manufacturing, who previously was at SpaceX for a decade and was the top production official for the Falcon 9 medium-lift launch vehicle, taking it from “prototype to production,” Lehman said.
“But his manufacturing team has involvement in every single engineering decision, both hardware and software, that’s made by the company and he has veto authority, because as Dino mentioned, if we build amazing technology and really capable platforms, if we can’t deliver them in the numbers needed or the timeframe needed it doesn’t matter,” he said. “So, everything we do, when there’s a good idea, it better be scalable, or it doesn’t make the cut or we tell the engineers to go back to the drawing board and find a better way to do it.”
Saronic in August participated in the Navy’s Grey Flag exercise, supplying its six-foot Spyglass USV to operate with Navy Special Warfare personnel from multiple combatant craft. “It was a full operational mission profile that we were demonstrating our capability to perform,” Lehman said.
Spyglass is equipped with sensors and a configurable payload bay to operate alone or in collaborative swarms in contested waters. The boat is launched and recovered at sea by expeditionary vessels, Saronic says on its website.
In March 2024, Spyglass and Cutlass, a 13-foot USV offering from Saronic, will participate in Integrated Battle Problem 24.1 involving a Navy-wide evaluation of unmanned systems in the Pacific relevant to the Indo-Pacific Command’s needs.
The upcoming exercise “is a big milestone for us” because “we’re going to demonstrate real demonstrable capabilities as far as collaborative teaming not just on the surface with our platforms, but working together with aerial drones, other platforms and other systems that the Navy has in place to enable this broader autonomous battlefield,” Mavrookas said. “And that just doesn’t exist in the USV market today.”
Integrated Battle Problem is a stepping stone to DoD acquiring autonomous unmanned systems given the “urgency” behind DoD’s need to adopt these systems, Mavrookas said.
Saronic is also developing a third USV it calls Corsair, although the company is not yet providing the specifications for the boat. Mavrookas said the company is building its vessels around missions and that Corsair will address missions not met by Spyglass and Cutlass.
There will be more systems to come.
“We really view it as a family of systems to address a wide swath of mission sets for the DoD because our software and autonomy scales across platforms,” he said. “It really does come down to just making a bigger or a smaller frame or a different size frame to meet different mission sets.”
The company is focused on meeting the Navy’s needs and then building systems to meet them, both executives said.
Spyglass is listed as having a range of 30 nautical miles, a top speed of 15 knots, and a 40-pound payload capacity. The respective specifications for Cutlass are 300 nautical miles, 20 knots, and 200 pounds. Cutlass will deploy loitering munitions, conduct intelligence and surveillance operations, and be a communications node as part of “adaptive” command and control networks, Saronic says.
The Series A funding was led by Caffeinated Capital and included 8VC, Andreesen Horowitz, Lightspeed Capital Ventures, Point72 Ventures, Silent Ventures, Overmatch Ventures, Ensemble VC, Cubit Capital, and the U.S. Innovative Technology Fund.
Saronic currently has 45 employees, up from 10 in the first few months of its founding. The company has grown fast and is moving fast, going from founding in Sept. 2022 to first design spin in Jan. 2023 to first boat in the water in June followed by participation in the first customer demonstration and exercise in August.
“We’re growing very rapidly and it’s not growth for growth’s sake,” Mavrookas said. “We understand the problem that we’re solving. We understand the threat from China and the deterrence that the U.S. needs.”