Inside Saronic’s $9.25B Autonomous Boat Factory | CEO Dino Mavrookas

0:00Today, an Austin-based company announced they are building a new shipyard called Port Alpha in Brownsville.

0:05Dino Mavrookas:The company's announced a$3.2 billion investment building a next-gen shipyard. We've raised$2.6 billion in total funding at a last valuation of$9.25 billion. 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 of 2025. We have the capacity to build 2 ,000 Corsairs per year. Port Alpha will initially support 850 foot ships and will expand up to be able to support 1200 foot ships. These are floating cities. 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.

0:55Dino, welcome to Sorcery. Thank you and thanks for having me. Well thanks for having me in Sironics Austin Texas HQ. Yeah I'll show you around the Corsair production line in a minute but the real crazy part is we actually just cut over our production line to this facility about a month ago. We moved in we have 420 ,000 square feet in this campus. We moved in six seven months ago for the very very 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 all out. This is crazy. So you were founded in 2022.

1:33You've raised over, you've raised$2.6 billion in total funding at a last valuation of$9.25 billion. And now you have an entire fleet of boats and ships being built here. That's right. And keep in mind too that this is only a fraction of what we have going on. We have seven locations in the U.S. We have two locations internationally. Our main manufacturing hubs are Austin, Texas. For everything below, call it right around 50 feet or 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.

2:16And 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. Just 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 of 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 1.5 X's the United States shipbuilding capacity right now, which sits at 100 ,000 gross tons.

2:57And we can take that yard all the way up to 2 million plus. So this is how you get back to scaled production of ships. And a lot of things we're doing around software and autonomy, ship design, shipyard design, we'll enable that. So what you're going to see here for as awesome as it is it's a piece of what we have going on and on this austin campus how many buildings you have because we just walked over from one huge building and it seems like that was just a lunch hall that's just we have seven buildings total okay um we have two that are primarily people spaces so think of engineers finance gna i sit in the corner they stick me in the corner kind of thing um very very collaborative workspaces conference rooms things like that the space that we were just in, it's not quite a lunch hall, but it really serves as a divide between our campus where you have the rest of the seven buildings total.

3:48The four buildings on this side are really all production, manufacturing, and industrial space. And that space in the middle is to bring both sides of the campus together to give people a space to work together to collaborate. Yes, grab lunch, hold all hands, do things like that. Because one of the things that we did very, very early on was really, really invest in this concept of vertical integration. It 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.

4:28So while it's technically not one roof, it's one campus and everybody works together. So if something's not working on the production floor, the hardware engineers are right there. And we just go grab them. Look, this isn't working. Let's redesign and let's get back to speed. It's crazy. So how many people are on this campus? Right around a thousand. We have about 1800 people total across all of our locations. We have three 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.

5:02We actually acquired that yard, but it was closing down. So closing down, the owners were laying off the workforce. How do you get a deal on that? Well, it was pretty fortuitous. I mean, 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 any shipyards to go to zero. And we wanted to start building very, very quickly. So we stepped in, we retained the workforce and we Penex the workforce in Louisiana, in Franklin, Louisiana to be specific. And then here in Texas, which is our headquarters, we have about a thousand people.

5:38And then Port Alpha, which I mentioned earlier, that's going to be based in Brownsville, Texas. So expanding within Texas and that site is going to create over 10 ,000 jobs just in the next 10 years. That's amazing. Okay. So before we walk down this way, I'm just going to ask Brett to just show a little glance of how big this space is.

6:00And then just to follow up on how big this space is, our first space, which was not even four years ago, was about 5 ,000 square feet. So literally from about here to the wall and 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. and I remember telling 20 people in that garage in Austin, I'm like, the future of maritime autonomy right now is dependent on what we're building right here in this garage. And now I just remind them, I'm like, 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.

6:43Wow. Okay. So as we walk through this, what are we going to be seeing? So this right here is the main Corsair production line. You can see workstations, sub-assemblies, everything that flows into high-rate production. The top caps are over here. The holes are over here. There's steps at every single workstation. So they'll complete one step, move it to the next station, and onward in this linear flow. It makes it very easy to actually spot bottlenecks 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 then also very quickly identifying where the system is not working.

7:26So when you have this linear flow, like there, you can see there's actually no boat in that workstation. If we wanted to dive in, I would just go up to the folks working here and say, hey, why hasn't this boat progressed? Is there a holdup in the supply chain? Is there a part missing? basically my kids can walk through this production line and identify where something isn't flowing appropriately and then start asking questions on how do you get it back to rate that's what our leaders are doing the team's pushing it through the production line and all of this is focused on rate production at scale so in just this line we're walking down right now we can build, we have the capacity to build 2000 Corsairs per year.

8:08Oh, wow. That doesn't even count the production line that's 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 scale that we're talking about here. And then as you look around, it's really just a rectangle. This is not a complicated building. It's not a really exquisite manufacturing facility. So if we needed to, and then we're talking a lot about just expanding production capacity here in the U.S., but also as we talk to our allies and partners overseas, how do we quickly stand up production internationally?

8:49It's a warehouse facility. And because we have the system, again, the system that builds the system, you basically have the blueprint for everything. You have the supply chain, the processes, the work instructions, the training, and you can get up and running very quickly. So that's a good question. In terms of building out the talent in this facility and the ones that you're expanding to, one, how do you find people? Where are you pulling them from? And then two, with the training and the system, how does that, how do you actually train them? Like, what is the process there and how quick do they start to run the line?

9:22So workforce is actually a critical reason why we selected Austin in the first place. Folks have asked us in the past, you know, you're a maritime company. Why based in a landlocked city? And it was really, I say that jokingly, but it's a good question. It is a fair question. And the answer is it all just revolves around people. It revolves around the talent that you see around you. And I'll kind of bifurcate the workforce into two segments because for Corsair, a lot of the talent exists. It's very, very similar to auto manufacturing or anything else where you're just building things. And we actually can build a lot of boats in this country, smaller vessels.

10:06When you talk about workforce for shipbuilding, that's where the real bottlenecks come in. And so as we think about creating 10 ,000 jobs in a shipyard, right, that's where we're investing so heavily in the training, in the work instructions, in the processes, in the infrastructure, in 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.

10:48So for people who don't have full context on Saronic, which I would be very surprised if you don't at this point, many headlines a lot of the time. Can you just share what the magic is behind Saronic? What is so special about these boats? I get that question so often, and it's not just one thing. If we could talk about the hardware and 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. And the software we're building isn't like any other software for the maritime autonomy market in the world, period.

11:31It'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. But 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 into our allies that's actually working and actually delivering capabilities in a wartime environment.

12:18I'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. It's like I could pull out my phone, turn on the air condition, open the door, call my Tesla to come pick me up. And I'm like 50-50 if I get in my Chevy Tahoe and my Apple CarPlay connects or not. Like there's fundamental reasons behind that. And if you're not co-designing with the hardware, software production in mind, then things aren't going to integrate and they're not going to work.

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14:24To train superintelligence, visit turing.com slash S-O-U-R-C-E-R-Y. AI needs more than chips. It needs power, land, and infrastructure. Zone develops next-generation data center campuses, partnering with AI companies, site developers, and technology leaders to bring compute online faster and at scale. Zone is building the foundation of the AI frontier. Visit zonefrontier.com to learn more. That's zone frontier dot com to learn more. Okay, so we're nearing the end of the Corsair fleet that's currently in production. Yep. Where do these go after they're done? So, 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.

15:12And then they get shipped out to the customers. Wow. So we have Corsair's operational in use. We've announced a$392 million contract with the Navy in December of 2025. And then recently put out in the news, 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 two downed pilots. And then an offensive attack on an Iranian port, which actually took out an Iranian submarine. Wow. Can you explain that? Because you served in the Navy.

15:52Dino Mavrookas:Yeah. How insane is that, that you actually don't have manned ships doing that, but you have autonomous ships completing missions like that? 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 weren'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. Like what is the commander's intent? If you're not building for that, you're actually not delivering a capability.

16:29And 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 you're actually able to complete these missions without putting people in 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, I was in the Navy SEAL teams from 2004 to 2015.

17:14In 2005, there's a helicopter that was shot down while trying to rescue SEALs that were trapped behind enemy lines. So 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. So in able 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 plus one redundancy. You have to have 99.99999 % confidence that the platform's gonna do exactly what it says, what we say it's going to do and what the military is counting on it to do.

18:08There's absolutely no room for failure. And to do that, we just invest. We invest in testing. We invest in software. So 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 to how the radios are working to the bandwidth on the comms channel, literally everything. And all of that's important as you're heading into a mission. And then the testing that we invest in, we have three test sites in the US. We're testing internationally now in our Australia and UK locations.

18:44And that's just at our internal test ranges. We have over 25 ,000 hours tested with Corsair alone. That doesn't count government test ranges and combat operations. So it's just continuously running the platforms, iterating, and making them better at the speed of both modern hardware and software. What have been the biggest bottlenecks there?

19:12Time on the water, right? There's only so much that you can test in simulation, right? And that's that's a big way to speed up development of autonomy right you test stuff in simulation you get to the 80 answer but that you can do in 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 the different elements that the the ocean presents and it's a challenging environment. It's a very challenging environment. I live there. The ocean breaks everything. The ocean literally breaks everything.

19:53So we have to make sure that we're building extremely reliable platforms. And then this is Mirage. So we can actually walk up there in a second, but it's a 52 foot version of Corsair, essentially, which Corsair is 24 feet. So you say, okay, it's two and a half times two and a quarter times larger no it's actually 15 times larger volumetrically oh wow so what that opens up is more range more payload capacity so corsair goes a thousand nautical miles with a thousand pound payload capacity this will carry 3 500 pounds with a 2 500 nautical mile range so it really opens up the mission set um this from basically where that and this is our second one actually that we're building.

20:43We just launched the first one about a week and a half ago. That's already in C-Trials, already going through the testing that we talked about. But basically from about where we're standing back is all payload capacity. It's all just open deck space. So I'll just, I'll let you use your imagination for what you could put on the back there. And then I would, I love to walk you up just so you can get a sense for the machinery the equipment that goes into these vessels because it really is quite complex but our engineers like have made it so like 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 um i will ask the camera to stay down here right you're gonna have fun but once you get up here you can see i mean oh my god massive engines fuel tank, additional payload space in the front.

21:39So 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 do that one? We do. So we have two, we have four actually, four overhead cranes that can be used to lift and mount. And then we have two mobile cranes that are around here somewhere. One, that blue one right there and then I think the other one's around the corner so yeah we have all the machinery to move these things very very quickly yeah through the production line and so you guys went with diesel did you try to do anything we tried to like we went all electric we did hybrid diesel electric actually our very first product was a six foot all electric mini jet ski so when you think about it I mean six feet isn't probably as big as that engine right Yeah, that's huge.

22:33You can't see it, but it's huge. And what we learned from all electric is you just don't get the range and the payload capacity that the military is looking for. So that platform actually became a great subscale demonstrator. And we iterated on that. We tested, we developed, we put it in front of the customer. And that's what actually that iterative process is actually what led us to Corsair. The first prototype you did wasn't that on a raft or a dinghy or something? What was that? I was listening to this pod you did. Yeah, you guys are the, okay, so we don't technically count that as a prototype.

23:11But I guess it is. It was an$800 raft that we bought on Amazon. Wow. And it was just this plastic fishing boat. and our software engineers took$30 ,000 worth of cameras and batteries and electronics and everything else that basically went into Spyglass, which is that six foot mini jet ski that I was talking about. And they built out the software stack, they built out the autonomy while we were building out the hardware in parallel. And that philosophy actually is what lets us move so quickly into developing new platforms. It's why we're showing you Mirage today, why we have Marauder out in Franklin is because a lot of our software, a lot of our autonomy translates across all of our platforms.

23:59So we're not rebuilding everything every single time we launch a new product. So that lets us move very, very quickly, keep making the software better and better every single day and just launching new hardware platforms. Enduring global leadership demands advanced mission systems and technologies. At Applied Aerospace and Defense, they unleash the power of precision manufacturing with unmatched scale and agility. Their customers can focus on innovation knowing their production is backed by an undeniable heritage. Applied Aerospace and Defense, engineered for the edge, trusted to deliver. Visit AppliedAD.com.

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25:48Paid for by Public Investing. Full disclosures in the description. Founders scale faster on deal. Set up payroll for any country in minutes, hire anyone anywhere, get visas handled fast, and get back to building. Visit deal.com slash sorcery. That's D-E-E-L dot com slash sorcery. Did you imagine that you were going to be building ships like Marauder? Like, did you, how did the progression start? Was it just demand? It was iterative. It was iterative. If you asked me four years ago if we would ever build ships, I would have said, no, you're crazy. That's why we're actually building Corsair. So you don't have to build ships, right?

26:31And the realization that we had was why we needed Corsair was really around shipbuilding in general in the first place, right? We're in a shipbuilding crisis here in the US, right? China now builds us 230 to one. Our naval fleet is actually shrinking and we have 0.1 % of global shipbuilding capacity. That's a non-existent industry. And if you understand history and what has dictated naval power, it's really just the ability to build ships. 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. And so we can scale that.