Inside the $9 billion Texas startup building a drone armada for the U.S. Navy

It was September 2022, and Dino Mavrookas was trying to build the future of U.S. naval power atop an $800 dinghy. A former Navy SEAL turned tech investor, Mavrookas had recently launched the startup Saronic Technologies with a vision for shoring up America’s defenses: cheap, fast autonomous boats that could be commanded in swarms, armed with sensors and weapons, and manufactured at factory scale. But first, he and his team, veterans of Space X and Anduril, needed a prototype. So they bought a raft off Amazon and began rigging it with $30,000 in off-the-shelf cameras, sensors, and motors in their bare-bones Austin warehouse. A month later, Ukraine used its own makeshift drone boat to strike a multimillion-dollar Russian warship. Soon, lawmakers and naval officials were traveling to Austin to see the prototype. “Everybody was like, ‘Oh, drone boats are massively effective against larger naval vessels,’” Mavrookas says. Just 90 days after launching, Saronic signed its first Navy contract. Since then, Mavrookas’s vision has become a strategic imperative. For years, the U.S.’s long-term strategy has focused on the South China Sea, where Beijing’s potential plans to take Taiwan involve a flotilla of autonomous carriers and stealth unmanned surface vessels (USVs), aka drone boats. But after the U.S. and Israel launched their attacks on Iran, the Strait of Hormuz, where Iran’s cheap aerial drones and kamikaze skiffs have upended U.S. war plans and disrupted the global economy, the demand signal, as they call it, is blaring. “We’re seeing our thesis play out in real time,” Mav­rookas says. “We need this as a country.” Indeed, in early June, two U.S. airmen went down with their helicopter near the coast of Oman; roughly two hours later, they were rescued by 5th Fleet’s drone-focused Task Force 59—using one of Saronic’s USVs. It was a Navy first, and possibly a world first. Industrial Revolution: Saronic acquired and revived the Gulf Craft shipyard in Louisiana last