Inside the Factory Building America’s Autonomous Navy

Today, an Austin-based company announced that it is building a new shipyard called Port Alpha in Brownsville.

The company has announced a $3.2 billion investment to build a next-generation shipyard.

You've raised $2.6 billion in total funding at a last valuation of $9.25 billion.

Yep.

And now you have an entire fleet of boats and ships being built here.

We've announced a $392 million contract with the Navy in December 2025. We have the capacity to build 2,000 Corsairs per year. Port Alpha will initially support 850-foot ships and will expand to support 1,200-foot ships.

These are floating cities. Now we're going to build the largest shipyard in the country, the most advanced shipyard in the world. We're going to bring shipbuilding back in a way that we haven't seen since World War II.

Dino, welcome to Sourcery.

Thank you, and thanks for having me.

Thanks for having me in Saronic's Austin, Texas, headquarters.

Yeah. I'll show you around the Corsair production line in a minute, but the really crazy part is that we actually just moved our production line to this facility about a month ago. We moved in, and we have 420,000 square feet on this campus. We moved in six or seven months ago for the first time, and we're already completely full. The production line is running at full speed. We have other products that we'll show you, but it is moving full out.

This is crazy. You were founded in 2022. You've raised over— you've raised $2.6 billion in total funding at a last valuation of $9.25 billion.

Yep.

And now you have an entire fleet of boats and ships being built here.

1. Saronic Expands Its Footprint

That's right. Keep in mind, too, that this is only a fraction of what we have going on. We have 7 locations in the U.S. and 2 locations internationally.

Our main manufacturing hubs are Austin, Texas, for everything below, call it, right around 50 feet, including our Mirage product, which we'll show you. Then we have Franklin, Louisiana, which is our second manufacturing hub, where we're actually building ships. We're building Marauder, which is a 180-foot, fully autonomous ship for defense and commercial applications.

Then we just announced Port Alpha, which is going to be the largest, most advanced shipyard literally anywhere in the world. We're starting on about an 800-acre footprint. Just for context—

800 acres?

800 acres.

Oh, my God.

That footprint alone will make it the largest shipyard in the country. That's our initial phase. We have the ability to expand to over 4,000 acres for that shipyard.

We're going to bring online 150,000 gross tons of capacity within a few years. That's our initial build-out. That's 1.5 times the United States' shipbuilding capacity right now, which sits at 100,000 gross tons, and we can take that yard all the way up to more than 2 million.

So this is how you get back to scaled production of ships. A lot of the things we're doing around software and autonomy, ship design, and shipyard design will enable that. What you're going to see here, as awesome as it is, is just a piece of what we have going on.

And on this Austin campus, how many buildings do you have? We just walked over from one huge building, and it seems like that was just a lunch hall.

We walked from— that's just the— we have 7 buildings total.

Okay.

We have 2 that are primarily people spaces, so think of engineers, finance, and G&A. I sit in the corner—they stick me in the corner, basically. They're very collaborative workspaces, with conference rooms and things like that.

The space that we were just in isn't quite a lunch hall, but it really serves as a divide between our campus. The 4 buildings on this side are all production, manufacturing, and industrial space, and that space in the middle brings both sides of the campus together, giving people a place to work together and collaborate. Yes, they can grab lunch, hold all-hands meetings, and do things like that.

2. Vertical Integration Drives Scale

One of the things that we did very early on was invest heavily in this concept of vertical integration. That means you design the hardware, you build the software, but then you also build the physical things. You build the boats, you manufacture, you have a machine shop, you have your inventory—you have everything that's needed to produce at scale, and you bring all of that together as one.

So while it's technically not under one roof, it's one campus, and everybody works together. If something's not working on the production floor, the hardware engineers are right there.

Yeah.

We just go grab them and say, “Look, this isn't working. Let's redesign it and get back up to speed.”

It's crazy. How many people are on this campus?

Right around 1,000. We have about 1,800 people total across all of our locations. We have 300 to 400 in our shipyard in Louisiana alone. We started that shipyard about a year ago. There were 30 people there when we started the yard.

Wow.

Yeah, it's pretty incredible. We actually acquired that yard, but it was closing down. The owners were laying off the workforce.

How do you get a deal on that?

It was pretty fortuitous. This was a really good yard. The owners wanted to retire. The shipbuilding capacity in that yard was going to zero. We'll talk a lot about shipbuilding capacity, but we can't afford for any shipyards to go to zero.

We wanted to start building very quickly, so we stepped in, retained the workforce, and pennexed the workforce in Louisiana, in Franklin, Louisiana, to be specific. Here in Texas, which is our headquarters, we have about 1,000 people. Port Alpha, which I mentioned earlier, is going to be based in Brownsville, Texas. So we're expanding within Texas, and that site is going to create over 10,000 jobs just in the next 10 years.

That's amazing. Before we walk down this way, I'm going to ask Brett to show us a little glimpse of how big this space is.

Just to follow up on how big this space is, our first space, which was less than 4 years ago, was about 5,000 square feet. Literally—

Oh, my God.

From about here to the wall, where you see this blue-tape rectangle.

It's like a standard-size Austin house.

That's all we had. It was a garage. It was literally just a garage. I remember telling 20 people in that garage in Austin, “The future of maritime autonomy right now is dependent on what we're building right here in this garage.”

Mm-hmm.

Now I just remind them, “Well, it's a much bigger garage and we have many more people, but the future of maritime autonomy is still very much dependent on what we're building right here.”

Wow. As we walk through this, what are we going to be seeing?

3. The System Builds The System

This right here is the main Corsair production line. You can see workstations, subassemblies, and everything that flows into high-rate production. The top caps are over here, and the hulls are over here. There are steps at every workstation, so they'll complete one step, move it to the next station, and continue in this linear flow. It makes it very easy to spot bottlenecks—

Mm-hmm.

—in the production line.

Our head of manufacturing came out of SpaceX. He was at SpaceX for 10 years, and he always talks about building the system that builds the system, but also about quickly identifying where the system is not working.

When you have this linear flow, you can see that there's actually no boat at that workstation. If we wanted to dive in, I would just go up to the people working there and say, “Hey, why hasn't this boat progressed? Is there a hold-up in the supply chain? Is there a part missing?”

My kids can walk through this production line and identify where something isn't flowing appropriately, and then start asking questions about how to get it back to rate. That's what our leaders are doing: pushing the teams through the production line. All of this is focused on rate production at scale.

On just this line we're walking down right now, we have the capacity to build 2,000 Corsairs per year.

Oh, wow.

That doesn't even count the production line on that side of the columns, so we could actually double that. Right now, we're using that production line for Mirage and additional products, but that gives you a sense of the scale we're talking about here.

As you look around, it's really just a rectangle. This is not a complicated building, and it's not an exquisite manufacturing facility. If we needed to—and we're talking a lot about expanding production capacity here in the U.S., but also about how we quickly stand up production internationally as we talk to our allies and partners overseas—you know, it's a warehouse facility.

Because we have the system—the system that builds the system—you basically have the blueprint for everything. You have the supply chain, the processes, the work instructions, and the training, and you can get up and running very quickly.

That's a good question. In terms of building out the talent in this facility and the ones you're expanding to, first, how do you find people? Where are you pulling them from?

Second, with the training and the system, how do you actually train them? What is the process there, and how quickly do they start—

To run the line?

4. Rebuilding The Maritime Workforce

Workforce was actually a critical reason why we selected Austin in the first place. Folks have asked us in the past, “You’re a maritime company. Why are you based in a landlocked city?” I say that jokingly, but it’s a good question.

It is. It’s a fair question.

And the answer is that it all just revolves around people. It revolves around the talent that you see around you. I’ll bifurcate the workforce into 2 segments, because for Saronic, a lot of the talent exists. It’s very, very similar to auto manufacturing or anything else, where you’re just building things.

Yeah.

And we actually can build a lot of boats in this country—smaller vessels. When you talk about the workforce for shipbuilding, that’s where the real bottlenecks come in. As we think about creating 10,000 jobs in a shipyard, that’s where we’re investing so heavily in the training, the work instructions, the processes, the infrastructure, and the design of the actual ships themselves.

How do you make the ships more simple? How do you design for that manufacturability so that you don’t have to have 15 years of experience to come and build a ship? We’re building ships so that we can rebuild the workforce, not saying, “Oh, the workforce doesn’t exist, so we can’t build this ship.”

For people who don’t have full context on Saronic—which I would be very surprised if you don’t at this point, given all the headlines—can you just share what the magic is behind Saronic? What is so special about these boats?

5. Hardware And Software Integration

It’s a great question. I get that question so often, and it’s not just one thing. We could talk about the hardware, how we design the boats, and how we design for autonomy and manufacturability, which drives down costs and opens up mission capability.

We can talk about the software. The software we’re building isn’t like any other software for the maritime autonomy market in the world, period. It’s the most advanced. It’s what enables the control. It’s one thing to build 2,000 boats. It’s another thing to actually control 2,000 boats, and it’s software and autonomy that actually enables that.

Mm.

The thing that really makes us special is the ability to put that all together. It’s not just building one or the other. It’s not, “Okay, we could build a lot of boats.” MasterCraft can build a lot of boats. It’s not just building software. It’s actually doing all the integrations. It’s tying it all together.

It’s actually doing that hardware-software co-design so that you’re delivering the most advanced product to the Department of War and to our allies that’s actually working and actually delivering capabilities in a wartime environment.

I’ll use a Tesla analogy here for a second, and we can sit and debate if you think Teslas are the best cars or not. But you can’t really debate if they’re the best autonomous cars when compared to Ford and General Motors and other things.

I used to use an example, and it’s silly: I could pull out my phone, turn on the air conditioning, open the door, and call my Tesla to come pick me up. I’m 50/50 on whether I get in my Chevy Tahoe and my Apple CarPlay connects or not. There are fundamental reasons behind that, and if you’re not co-designing with the hardware-software production—

Mm.

—in mind, then things aren’t going to integrate, and they’re not going to work. It’s always going to fall down at that integration layer.

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Yep.

Where do these go after they’re done? How does this flow?

Right here, you’ll have the finished product. The top caps will get installed, and then they’ll go out that big bay door right there.

Mm-hmm.

Then they get shipped out to the customers.

Wow.

6. Autonomy Meets The Battlefield

We have Corsairs operational and in use. We announced a $392 million contract with the Navy in December of 2025, and then recently put out in the news that Corsairs, which you just saw, were actively being used in the Straits of Hormuz.

Two examples that were made public were, one, the Apache pilot rescue of 2 downed pilots, and then an offensive attack on an Iranian port that actually took out an Iranian submarine.

Wow. Can you explain that? Because you served in the Navy. How insane is it that you actually don’t have manned ships doing that, but you have autonomous ships completing missions like that?

Yeah.

Well, that’s what it’s all about. It’s about the mission, right? We talked about the software and the autonomy and the importance of it all working together. If you aren’t completing missions, you’re not actually giving commanders optionality.

Cool boats that can drive themselves, or autonomous platforms in general—boats, planes, whatever—you actually have to complete the mission. What is the commander’s intent? If you’re not building for that, you’re actually not delivering a capability, and then that commander is going to revert back to the resources that they have at their disposal: traditional assets, manned platforms, et cetera.

The importance of switching to autonomy, again, to complete the mission, is that you’re actually able to complete these missions without putting people at risk, without putting people in harm’s way, and that’s super powerful, right?

Take the Apache pilot rescue, for example. That was the first-ever combat search and rescue done with an autonomous system. I can personally give you the importance of that because I lived through it. I was in the Navy SEAL teams from 2004 to 2015. In 2005, there was a helicopter that was shot down while trying to rescue SEALs that were trapped behind enemy lines.

Now, to be able to perform those rescues without putting additional people in harm’s way—and look, you might not always be able to do it with an autonomous system, but when you can, we absolutely should.

Mm-hmm. So, in order to ensure that, what kind of redundancies do you build onto the ship or the boat? How do you ensure communication, bandwidth, all that is reaching?

The way our engineers talk about it is always N+1 redundancy.

Mm.

You have to have 99.99999% confidence that the platform’s going to do exactly what it says, what we say it’s going to do and what the military is counting on it to do. There’s absolutely no room for failure.

Mm-hmm.

To do that, we just invest. We invest in testing, and we invest in software. Going back to the hardware-software interfaces, every single piece of hardware is instrumented onto this platform, so they can tell you everything from the temperature to the oil level, how the radios are working, and the bandwidth on the comms channel. Literally everything.

All of that’s important as you’re heading into a mission. And then the testing that we invest in—we have 3 test sites in the US. We’re testing internationally now at our Australian and UK locations, and that’s just at our internal test ranges.

We have over 25,000 hours of testing with Corsair alone. That doesn’t count government test ranges and combat operations. It’s just continuously running the platforms, iterating, and making them better at the speed of modern hardware and software.

What have been the biggest bottlenecks there?

Time on the water, right? There’s only so much that you can test in simulation, right?

Yeah.

That’s a big way to speed up development of autonomy, right? You test stuff in simulation, you get to the 80% answer, and you can do that faster than real time.

Real-time testing is, by definition, real time, and so you have to be out in the ocean. You have to be dealing with waves and salt water and all of the different elements that the ocean presents, and it’s a challenging environment.

Mm-hmm.

It’s a very challenging environment.

I lived there. The ocean breaks everything. The ocean literally breaks everything, so we have to make sure that we're building extremely reliable platforms. And then this is Mirage. We can actually walk up there in a second, but it’s a 52-foot version of Corsair, essentially.

Mm-hmm.

Corsair is 24 feet, so you say, “Okay, it's 2.5 times, 2.25 times larger.” No, it's actually 15 times larger volumetrically.

Oh, wow, yeah.

What that opens up is more range and more payload capacity. Corsair goes 1,000 nautical miles with a 1,000-pound payload capacity. This will carry 3,500 pounds with a 2,500-nautical-mile range, so it really opens up the mission set. This is our second one actually that we're building. We just launched the first one about a week and a half ago. That's already in sea trials, already going through the testing that we talked about. But basically, from about where we're standing back is all payload capacity.

Really?

It's all just open deck space.

Hmm.

I'll let you use your imagination for what you could put on the back there. I'd love to walk you up just so you can get a sense for the machinery and the equipment that goes into these vessels, because it really is quite complex. Our engineers have made it so it's really hard to design something simply. It's not easy, but it’s simple, and that’s how you get to manufacture at scale. I will ask the camera to stay down here.

He's going to stay down here. Ray, you're going to have fun.

But once you get up here, you can see—I mean…

Oh, my God.

Massive engines, fuel tanks, and additional payload space in the front. So this is what I was saying about deck and cargo space. You can see the top cap on this side. That is all cargo space.

That's wild. So do you have a big crane that takes us over here? Like, how do you—

We do.

That one? Or—

We have 4 overhead cranes that can be used to lift and mount, and then we have 2 mobile cranes that are around here somewhere. One is that blue one right there. I think the other one's around the corner. We have all the machinery to move these things very, very quickly through the production line.

Yeah.

And so you guys went with diesel. Did you try to do anything like—

We tried going all-electric.

Yeah.

Actually, our very first product was a 6-foot, all-electric mini jet ski. So, when you think about it, 6 feet probably isn't as big as that engine right there.

Yeah, that's huge. You can't see it, but it's huge.

What we learned from all-electric is you just don't get the range and the payload capacity that the military is looking for. That platform became a great subscale demonstrator. We iterated on that, we tested, we developed, and we put it in front of the customer. That iterative process is what led us to Corsair.

The first prototype you did, wasn't that on a raft or a dinghy or something? What was that?

You guys are—

I was listening to this podcast you did, and it was like—

Yeah. Okay, so we don't technically count that as a prototype. But I guess it is. It was an $800 raft that we bought on Amazon. It was just this plastic fishing boat, and our software engineers took $30,000 worth of cameras, batteries, electronics, and everything else that basically went into Spyglass, which is that 6-foot mini jet ski that I was talking about. They built out the software stack. They built out the autonomy while we were building out the hardware in parallel, and that philosophy is what lets us move so quickly into developing new platforms. It's why we're showing you Mirage today.

Mm-hmm.

That's why we have Marauder out in Franklin. A lot of our software and a lot of our autonomy translate across all of our platforms. We're not rebuilding everything every single time we launch a new product. That lets us move very, very quickly, keep making the software better and better every single day, and just launch new hardware platforms.

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It was iterative.

Okay.

It was iterative. If you asked me 4 years ago if we would ever build ships, I would've said, “No, you're crazy. That's why we're actually building Corsair. So you don't have to build ships,” right?

Mm.

7. Saronic Takes On Shipbuilding

The realization that we had around why we needed Corsair was really about shipbuilding in general in the first place. China—we're in a shipbuilding crisis here in the US. China outbuilds us 230 to 1. Our naval fleet is actually shrinking, and we have 0.1% of global shipbuilding capacity. That's a nonexistent industry, and if you understand history and what has dictated naval power, it's really just the ability to build ships. So you're like, “Oh, crap. We can't build ships. We need naval power. What can we build?” And it turns out we can build a lot of boats, so we started building Corsair.

Mm.

And said, “We can scale that. We can make a lot of these. We can make them very cost-efficient, and we can deter the Chinese from crossing the Taiwan Strait.” The other thing I want to highlight there is we actually started working on this before the very, very first USV strike happened in Ukraine.

Really?

So that's a super significant moment, right? And now, looking back on it and seeing what the Ukrainians have done, it's like, okay, yeah, a lot of speedboats could be very, very effective against a much larger fleet. That wasn't really obvious when we started building.

Mm-hmm.

Back to your question, I'm like, okay, so how did we even get here? Well, Corsair was extremely successful. That gave us more resources to go after even bigger problems, and as we looked at the shipbuilding industry, it was a much bigger problem. In some regards, you just can't replace gross tonnage. So while we looked at Corsair as saying, “Okay, how do we deter the Chinese fleet?” there is demand.

There is a need for the shipbuilding industry in general. There is a need for larger platforms, for more range, more payload capacity. And as we proved out our success, we say, “Yeah, you know what? We're going to go tackle that problem, too. Now we're going to go build the largest shipyard in the country, the most advanced shipyard in the world. We're going to bring shipbuilding back in a way that we haven't seen since World War II.”

So how big does this get? Are you going to build aircraft carriers?

Port Alpha will initially support 850-foot ships, and we'll expand up to be able to support 1,200-foot ships. Those are the largest ships. These are floating cities.

Mm-hmm.

I don't know that we'll ever build a traditional aircraft carrier. I think the hybrid fleet of the Navy moving forward looks very different, and there are companies that build traditional aircraft carriers today.

Right.

What we want to do is supplement that with platforms that can scale in really large numbers, and we also want to focus on commercial shipbuilding.

If you go back 45 years or so, the very first thing that happened to the U.S. shipbuilding industry was the removal of a commercial shipbuilding subsidy. This completely decimated the international commercial market for U.S. ships, and with it went the supply chain, workforce, and everything else. Then in 1993, the Last Supper and the decline of the Department of Defense budget happened, and everybody kind of focuses on that in the defense tech industry as a watershed moment. And it certainly was, but it wasn't the first watershed moment for the shipbuilding industry.

So it was that first one in 1981, followed by that second one in 1993, when the Navy's budget went down by 41%, that just took the shipbuilding industry and turned it upside down. If you look around, shipyards turned into apartment complexes. There's a reason why you can go and rent an apartment at a place called the Naval Yard all over the country, right? It's because they actually used to be Navy yards. They used to be shipyards.

Yeah.

And they just shut down. So now we need to rebuild that infrastructure. We need to invest in infrastructure. We need to invest in net-new capacity to get the shipbuilding industry back to where we need it to be, but not just building the same ships we've been building for the last 100 years. Really building for the future, building for autonomy.

As we walk through the entire facility, I have to ask you: if you didn't have your role as CEO, which job—you can choose any of these jobs in here—would you choose?

I'd want to build the boats.

You don't?

Yeah. No, I do.

Oh, you do?

I'd want to build. I'd want to be on the production line. I'll tell you, I actually—so I started my—this was 25 or 30 years ago. I was actually an engineer. I was a computer and electrical engineer in college. 9/11 was my junior year, and that's what drove me into the military, but I actually like building things.

Mm-hmm.

I wouldn't say I do it very much, but I do come down and spend time on the production line, and the team kind of walks me through a station. It's very hand-holding.

Really?

They're like, “Do this, do that.”

Wow.

But I know in their heads they're thinking, “Please don't mess this up, because I just have to go fix it later.” But it's actually a lot of fun. I'd want to be here building the boats.

That's so much fun. Do people try to stay here over the weekends?

We do whatever it takes.

Yeah?

People do stay here over the weekends. We work long hours. I tell the team it's team and mission, right? How do we accomplish our mission, and what does the team need to do that?

Mm-hmm.

Everybody's bought into that. But they're bought into the mission. They understand the importance of what we're working on and the urgency behind it. I mean, Corsairs are being used in a combat environment right now.

That's pretty crazy, yeah.

That's our customer. That's who we're delivering for. That's not a 9-to-5.

Yeah. It's a big, big deal. Okay. So as we wrap up this portion, we're gonna go head into some sit-downs with your other three co-founders. And if you haven't watched it yet, check out all those interviews. Thank you.

Awesome.

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