Dino Mavrookas: America Needs to Build Ships Again

The U.S. used unmanned sea drones for the first time during a recent attack in Iran, and a company here in Austin created those drones. Saronic is a defense tech company that focuses on creating boat-like sea drones for the military.

Not just the defense market—the entire maritime industry is centered around autonomy. That's what we're building for at Saronic. We're actually going to be able to launch a hypersonic missile off the back of Marauder, which is an autonomous ship, before the Navy completes its first test of a hypersonic missile off a manned vessel.

That's crazy.

Yeah. If we ever actually do get into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait that leads to World War III or anything dramatic, China can outproduce the rest of the world in terms of ships. China outbuilds the U.S. 230 to 1. The naval fleet that we have today is actually shrinking. They built over 1,000 commercial ships last year. The United States built 5.

One last question. It's the most difficult question.

Okay.

Some people had to walk out of the room because I asked this question.

I won't walk out on you.

What is your hottest take right now? Dino, welcome back. This is your second trip. We recently went into your facility, looked at all the Corsairs, and just saw a Mirage.

Yeah.

And now we're here in—I don't know—what do you call this space?

This is our all-hands space. This is where we bring the team together and hold fun events. We actually had our Christmas party here. I think we had over 1,000 people at our last Christmas party.

Wow.

This is a collaborative area where folks can come together and work in a really casual space, bring the production team together with the engineering team, and make sure that we continuously collaborate and share information across the company.

1. The Shipbuilding Gap

To set the table, we talked a bit about your stats when we started the last walking tour. So you're now at over a $9 billion valuation. You raised $2.6 billion. You've just announced—this was a little debate about whether it would still be fresh in a month, but I think so—Port Alpha.

That's right.

The $3 billion Port Alpha.

Yeah.

To bring all that into focus against the backdrop of what's going on in America, I'd love for you to lay out the stats that we're working with. Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar just talked about this, but we're being outbuilt by China in shipbuilding.

It's actually pretty crazy. China outbuilds the U.S. 230 to 1. The naval fleet that we have today is actually shrinking. There are right around 290 ships in our naval fleet. In 2018, Congress actually set a statutory minimum of 355 ships. That was 8 years ago, and we're going in the wrong direction.

In 2024, the Navy actually looked at it and said, “We don't actually need 355. We need 381.” And those are just manned ships, let alone all the unmanned ships that we're going to need in our fleet. The shipbuilding infrastructure that we have in this country today just won't support that.

That's why we started Saronic. That's why we started building autonomy. That's why we focus so heavily on production and manufacturing—not just of Corsair and Mirage, which we saw earlier, but of Marauder and now Port Alpha, much larger ships. How do we start actually building both large defense and large commercial ships in this country again?

2. Bureaucracy Slows Defense

I want to talk a little bit about the bureaucracy and what's entangled there.

Where are we going to start?

I know. In that clip of Shyam, he was talking about how bureaucracy has just clogged up the system, and so much so that it resulted in this. So what is the state of that? We just had Rob on, and he was talking about acquisition reform.

Yeah. He leads that effort for us. Front and center every single day, he's dealing with our Navy customer.

I'll give you two sides of it. First, there has been movement. I was in the SEAL Teams for 11 years, from 2004 to 2015. My last 5 years were on SEAL Team Six. This is the fastest I've actually seen the government move with anything. So there is a lot of urgency around it.

The new administration is putting a lot of focus in this area. You see the president's budget request for $1.5 trillion. They put out a maritime executive order and the maritime action plan specifically around shipbuilding. You have the SHIPS Act, which is in Congress and focused on the shipbuilding industry.

There's a lot of focus on defense, defense technology, the industrial base, and shipbuilding, and things are changing. But when you look at the budget today—let's look at the Department of War's budget—we talked about the request for $1.5 trillion and where the budget is today, right around $1 trillion for 2026. One percent went toward autonomy. That just gives you a sense of how far we actually have to go.

In terms of the bureaucracy and what needs to change, you're getting a lot of push from the top down—from leadership, from the administration, which I just highlighted, and from Capitol Hill—to invest in things that are not only much more economical but also scalable.

When you talk about ships, one of the biggest examples is aircraft carriers. They take over 10 years to make, and that number increases by the day because the program is getting later and later, and the cost keeps going up. I was actually quoting $13 billion for an aircraft carrier at an event where the president spoke just last week. He quoted $19 billion, and I was like, “What is happening to the budget here?”

You have a lot of focus from Congress because there's a 30-year shipbuilding plan in the Navy right now. We talked about going from 290 to 381 over 30 years. That'll cost $1.2 trillion if we can even execute that plan as a country in the first place.

What we're building at Saronic will not only provide more capabilities faster, but it'll save the taxpayer hundreds of billions of dollars by driving down costs as well.

3. Private Capital Drives Scale

You talked a little bit about this on our walk, but how do you create the path to that scale?

You do it incrementally. We've demonstrated success at each step, and then we've gone after larger and larger problems. What we've had to do, and what we've done, is really bring together a world-class team and capital to invest in that team.

This again goes back to crediting the customer, because if the customer didn't move alongside us with these early wins, we wouldn't have been able to have them. We talked about Corsair and the large contract that we announced in December 2025, a multihundred-million-dollar contract with the Navy.

If the customer didn't prioritize that—if they didn't say, “We're going to move to rapid acquisition. We're going to launch this solicitation through DIU because we need this capability, and we're just going to move fast”—we would have been able to build it, but we wouldn't have been able to build the track record of success, raise more capital, and invest in the next thing, which let us go and build Marauder.

Everything we're building here is because we're investing private capital ahead of demand, ahead of need, and building to scale to make sure that our warfighters get the best capability in their hands as fast as possible.

You mentioned Rob talked about defense acquisition reform. That's exactly what the Secretary of War is calling for. He's calling for companies to invest their own capital in really big ways and build for speed and scale. That's what the department needs. Those are his words, not mine, and that's what we're building for here at Saronic.

Why do you think it's so prescient for the private sector to be doing this?

It's an all-of-country effort. In order to break through the bureaucracy that you mentioned, you need companies to just go and do it. You need companies like Saronic—and Anduril was before us, and before that you had Palantir and SpaceX—to just go and build things, to show the government that there's a different way. There's a better way.

Let's not focus on cost-plus contracting, large exquisite systems, and everything else. Before we started building Saronic, the focus was just on large Navy ships. I'm not saying that we don't need cruisers, destroyers, and aircraft carriers. There certainly is a role for the traditional fleet, and there should be investment in the legacy defense-industrial base as it stands, because we need the primes that exist today.

We just need other companies to be built alongside them to support the platforms that they're not able to build and the technology that they're not able to build, to really benefit from that and make sure that the U.S. remains the most powerful military in the world.

Drew Odling actually gave us a couple of great questions, and one of them was, “How many new primes do you think there will be?”

I don't know the answer to that.

No?

No. I mean, you don't know. There's probably not going to be 100. When you look back—even if you go back to 1993—I think the number is 55 or 60, somewhere in there. That 55 or 60 went down to 5 over the course of 20 or 30 years as the department shrunk its budget and forced consolidation. Now we're in the reversal of that trend.

Do I think we get all the way up to 55? It depends on your definition of prime. Prime means a company that is contracting directly with the government, not through another company as a subcontractor. I'll define prime as directly contracting with the government at some sort of large scale. I think over the next 5 to 10 years—I won't dodge the question completely—I think there will be somewhere around 5 to 10.

Mm.

I think you'll see 5 to 10 really big, impactful companies scale over the next 5 to 10 years, and hopefully more.

4. Commercial Scale Strengthens Defense

How are you thinking about dual use in your commercial strategy?

This is something that I actually think gets overlooked a little bit: the importance of commercial capabilities when providing capabilities to the Department of War, especially in shipbuilding. Commercial shipbuilding builds the supply chain. It builds the industrial base. It lets you build for scale so that you're not only reliant on naval orders, which are bespoke orders and low volume.

That's the first step in how the shipbuilding fiasco even started. The commercial shipbuilding industry went away, and the supply chain and the workforce went with it. If you're going to take advantage of economies of scale, if you're going to build robust and resilient supply chains, you need a commercial strategy. Even Corsair is dual use, right? It's very commercially focused. We're looking at everything from port and harbor security to operations with the Coast Guard and things outside of the traditional military sense.

As you get into larger vessels, Marauder starts enabling commercial logistics operations. With Port Alpha, we're going to be looking at how we bring autonomy into the commercial shipping industry at large for container ships, tankers, and roll-on/roll-off vessels. This lets you build a commercial revenue base, but it's also absolutely critical for national security. If we don't have tankers and roll-on/roll-off vessels, it means we don't have the ships to resupply our forces if we're actually in a conflict or a war.

If you go back to World War II, some of the most important ships we built were just logistics ships. Commercial is critical on so many different vectors.

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So for you, thinking about scale, why focus on one theater of war, and if and when do you expand?

I'll give you a fun stat. I didn't actually know this, and I'll laugh at myself a little bit: the Army actually has more boats than the Navy does. But we're focused on all the services: Navy, Army, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard. How can we support the Air Force in combat search and rescue and other things? So we're focused on the military at large.

The Navy was our initial and still is our largest customer, and as we're building autonomous surface vessels, that makes a ton of sense. How do we redefine what that naval fleet of the future can look like and should look like? We're figuring that out together in partnership with the Navy, but we're very focused on all the services, very focused on commercial, and also internationally. Our allies are just as important in this effort. How do we make sure that our allies have the best technology out there?

It's not just the U.S. that's struggling in shipbuilding. China has 57% of total global shipbuilding capacity. A lot of our allies are struggling with the same things that the United States is: the lack of ability to just build ships. If you go back in history, even just back to World War II, what has typically determined naval power is who can build the most ships. It's not who can build the most exquisite or the most expensive ships, or whose ships have the most on them in terms of payloads, weapons, and all the other things. It's who can just build the most, who has the industrial base to just build the most. That determines naval power, and that's the whole genesis behind Saronic.

Isn't it the case that in China, you have to build every boat to military grade?

I don't know. It's a very opaque market, by the way.

I would imagine.

It's very hard to get information out of there, but they're building all types of ships. The biggest discrepancy really is in the commercial market. What that commercial market again lets them do is take the industrial capacity from the rest of the world, and they're doing that by undercutting on price. Their entire shipbuilding industry is completely subsidized. They have not only direct construction subsidies, but they subsidize the raw materials and the labor, and they basically give them free financing for these shipyards.

I'll give you a commercial stat: we're talking about 230 to 1. It's actually not as egregious when you look at just military ships. We, being the U.S., launch about 5 to 10 military ships—meaning destroyers, cruisers, aircraft carriers, straight naval vessels, warships. China's probably doing about 30, so 6 to 1, 7 to 1, somewhere in there.

They built over 1,000 commercial ships last year. The United States built 5. I think this was 2024: 5 large ocean-going commercial vessels. So what China's doing is taking the capacity from the rest of the world. Our allies, South Korea and Japan—the next 2 largest shipbuilders in the world—are actually getting a lot of their modules from China on the commercial side. They're getting a lot of their labor from China.

As that capacity diminishes, if we ever actually do get into a—God forbid—a conflict in the Taiwan Strait that leads to World War III or anything dramatic like that, China can outproduce the rest of the world in terms of ships. They just keep taking that capacity by undercutting the world on price in the commercial market.

5. Partnerships Accelerate Hypersonic Weapons

We talked about your commercial partnerships with Rob, Doug, and Vib a little bit. So between Palantir, Path Robotics, and NVIDIA, are we allowed to talk about Castellion?

Castellion, yeah. Let's talk about it. This is super exciting. Brian and I are super tied in on this. They're building containerized hypersonic missiles, and we're going to do a test launch of a hypersonic missile off the back of a Marauder. What we did that was so informative about this new era of defense tech is that Brian and I—Brian's the CEO of Castellion, by the way—just got on the phone and said, "Hey, we've got to go do this." We got our teams together and started working on it.

We're investing our own capital. We're saying, "Okay, how do we make this happen?" We brought the government in. So we're 8 steps ahead by the time the government even came in on this project, and we're actually going to be able to launch a hypersonic missile off the back of Marauder, which is an autonomous ship, before the Navy completes its first test of a hypersonic missile off of a manned vessel.

That's crazy.

Yeah.

Are you seeing a lot of those private partnerships happen faster because you're just able to call up your friend?

I wouldn't say it's calling up your friend, but it's calling like-minded companies that are forming in this space, that are passionate about defense, and that understand. It really is an all-of-country effort. If you're going to break through the bureaucracy, you have to prove it. You have to make it demonstrable. It can't just be, "Oh, this might be a little bit better," or even, in a commercial market sense, "10X better." It has to be, "Look, you can't actually live without this, and here it is."

That's what you're having companies do. They're investing that capital, and it's backed by a lot of really great venture capitalists who are passionate about the country. We talked about 8VC and Joe Lonsdale, and I know Drew sent in a bunch of questions. They actually backed us in the very beginning.

We started with 8VC, and it was because of a conversation I had with Joe about why he’s so passionate about defense. Then you look at Caffeinated Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Elad Gil, and lately Kleiner Perkins, which led our last round. Those are all our lead investors.

Every single one of them is passionate about the country. They’re looking for a return, they want to make good investments, and they want to bet on good companies and great people. But at the end of the day, they’re also extreme patriots, and they want to see the things that this country needs actually get built. They’re willing to take the risk and put their capital behind it.

6. Dino Builds Saronic From Scratch

So, starting and founding the company in 2022 out of 8VC’s build program, what was that process like for you?

For me, it actually just started with, I guess, a little risk of my own. I was working at a private equity company, Vista Equity Partners, a phenomenal company, and got out of the military in 2015. If I’m being completely honest, when I left the SEAL teams, I had no idea what I was going to do next. I was interested in finance, wanted to get into private equity, and went and did that for 5 years.

After 5 years, I started to look around and say, “Is this what I want to do for the next 20 or 30 years of my life?” I learned a ton about investing and operating companies, but was this what I wanted my career to be? The answer was no, and that really just drove me back into, “Okay, well, what do I care about? What do I want to get up out of bed every single day and go focus my energy and attention on?” And that was defense.

So I walked into the living room one night and told my wife that I had to quit my job. She asked me what I was going to do, and I said, “Start a defense tech company.” Her follow-on question was, “Great. Tell me what your company does,” and that’s where it all fell apart. I didn’t have the answers.

I just knew that I had to go focus my energy there, and I wasn’t going to come up with Saronic, or whatever the idea was at that point, if I was working 80 to 100 hours a week at a finance firm. So I left that job and had known Joe. When I had the conversation with him, my very first conversation, I was like, “Please don’t ask me any questions. I don’t know the answers yet.”

And he goes, “No. I want to invest in you. I want to help you start this company. Come build out the thesis. We’ll work on this together. Once it’s ready to go, we have the playbook—everything from legal, accounting, design, whatever you need to get this company off the ground fast and in a really big way.”

They really helped us in the early days with speed, the speed of execution, so we could just focus on building the business.

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Your wife helped you name the company, right?

Not just helped—she named it. We were searching for a name, and I’ll never forget. I was like, “I love this story.” We’re both Greek, by the way. My wife was born in Greece, and we were studying Greek history and going through a bunch of different rabbit holes trying to come up with a really cool name, and a meaningful one at that.

I’m reading the story of the Battle of Salamis, and I’m just like, “Such a cool story.” You understand, okay, you have Gates of Fire and the Battle of Thermopylae, which leads to this big naval battle between the Greeks and the Persians in the Second Greco-Persian War. The Persians actually have much larger, more exquisite ships. They get lured into a narrow strait off the coast of Athens, where the Greeks have smaller, more maneuverable ships, and they’re able to defeat the Persian navy and save democracy for the world, essentially.

I’m like, “Man, what an amazing story.” But you can’t name the company Salamis. She looks at me, and she’s reading the story with me, and she goes, “Well, why don’t you call it Saronic?” And I go, “No, I don’t like it.”

Really?

No, yeah. She kept at it for 3 days, and finally I was like, “Yeah, you know what? It sounds pretty cool.” The story behind it and everything—it couldn’t have been a better name for the company.

It’s a great name.

Yeah. It really is.

Hopefully, by the time this comes out, you’ll see The Odyssey.

You told me. I’ve got to go see it.

There’s a great lesson there on boats.

My kids are 11 and 10. I think I’m going to stretch them. I think I’m going to let them see it.

I think they’ll probably—It’s kind of scary—

That’s all right.

—for the first 40 minutes, but after that it’s okay.

All right. Good.

7. Autonomy Defines Maritime Future

As we look forward, this is maybe a larger question, but in the next 10 years, what does shipbuilding look like if everything goes right? And if not, what do you think still will need to be fixed?

What we’re going to do at Port Alpha—you mentioned 10 years—over the next 10 years, we’re going to create 10,000 jobs. We’re going to invest billions of dollars. I mean, we’re going to have a $160 billion economic impact in Brownsville, Texas, and around that area where Port Alpha is based.

What you’re going to see in shipbuilding is real industrial scale come back to this country. What you’ll see in terms of defense and the commercial market is more and more things shift toward autonomy. That’ll enable more scale and more production because what autonomy does, in addition to controlling the ship, obviously, is actually let you simplify the design of the ship because now people aren’t required.

That lets you design simpler ships. That lets you produce at scale. It lets you drive down costs, and it lets you open up markets that traditionally weren’t serviceable.

Okay, Dino. One last question. It’s the most difficult question.

Okay.

Some people had to walk out of the room because I asked this question.

Oh. I won’t walk out on you.

What is your hottest take right now?

We're sitting here talking about maritime autonomy. I’ll keep it plain and simple. I do believe—I’m fully convinced in the future of not just the defense market but the entire maritime industry being centered around autonomy, and that’s what we’re building for at Saronic.

Amazing. Cool. Well, thank you so much, and thank you for letting us be here for the whole day.

Uh—

It’s really awesome seeing everybody come in and out. There’s a good gender ratio as well. I respect that.

All right. We’re very focused on—look, we just hire the best people. We’re very, very blessed to have truly, truly amazing people here at Saronic, and I tell them all the time, “It is you all that make this company successful.”

We could have all the capital in the world and the most willing customer, but it’s the people that make this company go. In 4 years, we’ve grown to 1,800 people, and I focus every single day on keeping that simple fact ingrained in the culture: How do we focus on team and mission?

If everybody comes in and says, “What is my highest and best use of time for the team? What does the team need today, and what is mission success? I’m going to go do whatever it takes,” then that’s all we could ask. We are truly blessed with the people in this company.

It’s incredible. Thank you.

Awesome. Thank you.

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