THE ALGORITHMIC ARMADA

Founded by a former Navy SEAL, Saronic has a $9 billion plan to supercharge the Navy with drone boatsand prove that America can still build things.

- BY ALEX PASTERNACK

STEM TO STERN One of Saronic's first 160-foot Marauder drone ships takes shape at the company's Louisiana shipyard.

THE FUTURE OF U.S. NAVAL POWER started taking shape four years ago atop an $800 dinghy.

It was September 2022, and Dino Mavrookas, a former Navy SEAL turned tech investor, had recently launched the startup Saronic Technologies with a vision for shoring up America's defenses: cheap, fast autonomous boats that can be commanded in swarms, armed with sensors and weapons, and manufactured at factory scale. But first, he and his team, veterans of SpaceX and Anduril, needed a prototype. So they bought a raft off Amazon and began rigging it with $30,000 in cameras, sensors, and motors in their barebones 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 visit Saronic. "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. He points to the Strait of Hormuz, where Iran's cheap aerial drones and kamikaze skiffs have upended U.S. war plans and disrupted the global economy. In the South China Sea, meanwhile, Beijing's potential plans to take Taiwan involve a flotilla of autonomous carriers and stealth unmanned surface vessels (USVs), aka drone boats. "We're seeing our thesis play out in real time," Mavrookas says. "We need this as a country."