Startup Saronic to build ‘Port Alpha,’ next-gen shipyard focused on autonomous vessels

WASHINGTON — Off the back of a $600 million Series C funding round, Saronic, the Texas-based defense startup company, announced today it plans to build a “next-generation shipyard” focused on producing unmanned and autonomous vessels, dubbed “Port Alpha.”

The latest funding round was led by Elad Gil, a San Francisco-based entrepreneur and investor with previous stints at Google and Twitter. The round evaluated the company’s worth at $4 billion, which Saronic says effectively “quadrupled” its valuation.

“Port Alpha will reflect the apex of America’s shipbuilding past — generating new opportunities for the country’s shipbuilding workforce, forging public-private partnerships to accelerate growth, and bringing innovation and ingenuity to an essential industry,” said Dino Mavrookas, Saronic’s CEO. “We will bring these elements together with a single goal: to rapidly build a fleet of autonomous vessels in America that redefine maritime superiority and guarantees freedom of the seas for generations to come.”

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Speaking to reporters today, Mavrookas and Saronic co-founder Rob Lehman said they have not yet selected a location for the new shipyard and declined to provide a timeline for the new project, except to say they will move “as fast as possible.”

The company executives said they will work with federal and state governments to determine the best location, a decision which may be the biggest determiner of the new project’s success, because any new location is only going to be successful if they can sort out a key issue facing all naval programs today: Workforce development.

Finding people to build ships has a been a top issue for both the US Navy and the defense industrial base in recent years. The service just last year spent roughly $1 billion trying to attract new workers to build submarines. A recent effort to bolster the workforce, dubbed “SAWS,”  stirred a snafu on Capitol Hill in December and January as outgoing service leadership from the Biden administration and lawmakers traded accusations about a lack of transparency.

When pressed for how Saronic would overcome the existing workforce challenges, Mavrookas said Saronic is “changing the culture” around shipbuilding.

“You look at the workforce we built today, we have over 350 employees… We’ve attracted people from Silicon Valley that focus on software. We’ve been attracting people from SpaceX and Tesla that run our manufacturing and production line. Now we’re going to combine those folks with the lead naval architects and people that are focused on shipbuilding,” he said.

“We’re raising the private capital to hire the people. We’re creating a training pipeline to attract the people. We’re going have programs in place to recruit to people. We’re focused on building the entire ecosystem around this shipyard,” he continued.

Saronic in October unveiled plans to mass produce “hundreds” of its newest autonomous surface vessel, “Corsair,” citing the Pentagon’s need for expendable drones manufactured en masse. The company’s announcements largely align with the framework the Defense Department has projected for its Replicator initiative, but the company, like others that have made similar announcements, has been coy when asked about specific deals or discussions with the Pentagon.

The company last year also acquired a roughly 420,000-square-foot production and manufacturing facility in Austin, Texas. That space is scheduled to be fully operational by the end of this year, Mavrookas said.