America’s Autonomous Prime
Dino Mavrookas (CEO), Rob Lehman (CCO), Doug Lambert (COO), & Vibhav Altekar (CTO) are the 4 Co-Founders of Saronic, the autonomous maritime company that has gone from founding in 2022 to raising ~$2.6B in total funding to date at a $9.25B valuation in just 4 years.
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The founding team brings together deep experience across defense, maritime autonomy, engineering, and investing: Dino spent 11 years as a Navy SEAL before joining Vista Equity Partners; Doug has built maritime autonomy systems since 2012; Rob spent 21 years in the Marine Corps before working across major defense contractors and startups; and Vib was one of Anduril’s earliest engineers.
In Part III of our Saronic series, we sit down with all 4 founders to go deeper into the business and technology behind its rapid rise and the demand driving it.
We cover America’s growing shipbuilding gap with China, why Saronic is investing $3B+ into Port Alpha, scaling autonomous ship production, rebuilding the U.S. maritime supply chain, defense acquisition reform, hardware-software co-design, AI at sea, and what happens when autonomous fleets scale from a handful of vessels to hundreds.
𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒
(00:00) Dino, Doug, Rob, Vibhav, Co-Founders of Saronic Technologies
(00:56) America's shrinking naval fleet
(06:02) How China wins on price
(08:04) The Partnerships powering Saronic
(10:55) What Hypergrowth actually requires
(12:16) From Spyglass to Marauder: The Evolution
(13:13) Inside Saronic's operating structure
(14:43) What's actually slowing Re-Industrialization
(17:16) Building a workforce from scratch
(19:55) What Doug's looking forward to next
(22:10) Why Hard Tech is the future
(24:36) From the Marine Corps to Saronic
(28:18) Winning a Government contract in 90 days
(30:06) Why Acquisition reform matters so much
(34:44) What's Next for Saronic?
(36:15) From Juicero to Anduril to Saronic
(39:54) Saronic's development process, Then and Now
(42:48) Building Hardware and Software together
(46:00) The Biggest technical challenge in Maritime Autonomy
(53:55) Why Redundant comms are non-negotiable
(55:15) When communication fails mid-mission
(58:06) Why open source will define AI's future
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Saronic’s 4 Co-Founders on the American Shipbuilding Gap
Part III of Sourcery’s Saronic series is a sit-down with the company’s 4 co-founders:
CEO Dino Mavrookas
COO Doug Lambert
CCO Rob Lehman
CTO Vibhav Altekar
The conversation covers the economics of the Navy’s current plan, supply chain & labor constraints, defense acquisition, & the engineering & technical work behind an unmanned fleet.
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The Founding Team
Dino Mavrookas, CEO.
Served 11 years as a Navy SEAL, including 8 combat tours and time with SEAL Team Six, enlisting after 9/11. Left the service in 2015, earned a computer engineering degree from Rutgers and an MBA from Wharton, and moved into private equity, working at H.I.G. and later as a senior associate at Vista Equity Partners in Austin. He left private equity in March 2022 and launched Saronic roughly 6 months later. He sits on the board of the Navy SEAL Foundation.
Doug Lambert, COO.
Close to 2 decades in maritime technology, most recently working on submarines. He connected with Mavrookas in 2022, when the company was 2 people in the 8VC Founders Residence program, and describes the early operation as a garage in South Austin where everything was urgent and new.
Rob Lehman, CCO.
Penn State graduate who commissioned into the Marine Corps, deployed, and stayed in through the Reserves for 22 years total. He worked at defense primes, took over a struggling company, and co-founded 9 Line Solutions, a government relations and consulting firm helping technology companies navigate DoD acquisition. He met Mavrookas while working with 8VC and Joe Lonsdale, and moved his family from Northern Virginia to Austin. He is an inaugural member of the Department of War’s Science and Technology Innovation Board.
Vibhav Altekar, CTO.
Grew up in Cupertino, started in chemical engineering, played cricket competitively for a period, & returned to finish in electrical engineering. He interned at Juicero in 2017 through the Kleiner Perkins fellowship, which shut down 5 or 6 weeks into the internship. He then worked at 8VC’s build program before joining Anduril in late 2018, spending ~4 years there. He connected with Mavrookas through 8VC in summer 2022, when the pitch was autonomous hydrofoils, & moved to Austin at the turn of 2023. Kleiner Perkins later led Saronic’s Series D, which he describes as a full circle.
The Capacity Gap
Co-Founder & CEO, Dino Mavrookas, opens with the numbers.. China outbuilds the United States 230 to 1 across all shipbuilding and holds 57% of total global shipbuilding capacity. The US naval fleet sits at roughly 290 ships and is shrinking. Congress set a statutory minimum of 355 in 2018. In 2024 the Navy revised its requirement upward to 381, counting manned ships only.
The ratio narrows when the comparison is limited to warships. Mavrookas puts US launches at 5 to 10 military vessels a year against roughly 30 for China, closer to 6 or 7 to 1. The 230 to 1 figure is driven by commercial hulls.
“They built over 1,000 commercial ships last year, and the United States built five. I think this was 2024. Five, like one, two, three, four, five large ocean-going commercial vessels.”
His framing of what determines naval power really comes down to quantity.
“If you go back in history and you look at even just back to World War II, what has typically just determined naval power is who can build the most ships.
Who has the industrial base to just build the most?”
How China Took the Commercial Market
Mavrookas says China wins the commercial market on price, and that the price comes from subsidies. The Chinese government subsidizes ship construction directly, along with raw materials and labor, and gives shipyards free financing. He notes the market is opaque and hard to get information out of, so specifics are difficult to confirm.
The problem is not limited to US yards. South Korea and Japan are the next two largest shipbuilders in the world, and both buy modules and labor from China for their commercial work. If a conflict starts, China can outproduce the rest of the world combined.
“China can now produce the rest of the world in terms of ships, and they just keep taking that capacity by undercutting the world on price in the commercial market.”
Allied capability is a stated part of Saronic’s thesis rather than an adjacent market. Mavrookas notes that allies face the same inability to build ships that the United States does, and positions international alongside defense and commercial as a third channel. Lehman owns that portfolio.
The Product Ladder
Doug Lambert, Co-Founder & COO, walks through how the product line got here. Two products preceded Corsair. Lambert names Spyglass and a lesser-known platform called Cutlass, and describes the sequence as the company’s method rather than its history.
“We start small, we build up from there, we build momentum, we build understanding, and then we go and apply it to larger, more complicated systems.”
Marauder, at 180 feet, is the next rung. Spyglass taught them what they needed to build Corsair, and Marauder is meant to teach them what they need to build a 400-foot ship, an 800-foot ship, or a hull around 1,200 feet.
Operations & the Two Footprints
Lambert says roughly 1,600 people now roll up through his organization, spanning hardware engineering, supply chain, and mission operations and services.
The Texas and Louisiana footprints serve different purposes. Lambert describes the Austin campus as building boats and the Franklin, Louisiana shipyard as building ships that carry boats. Mission operations runs testing, deploys vessels worldwide and handles first-line customer support. When something breaks in the field, that team brings the problem back to engineering.
At Port Alpha, the goal is to stop doing final assembly work on the ship itself. Parts get built into subassemblies elsewhere, then combined into modules, then into larger modules, then into super modules.
Strategic Partnerships
Palantir Foundry runs internal manufacturing execution and material resource planning systems, effectively the logistics backbone of the business. Lambert describes adoption as unexpectedly fast, reaching supply chain analysts building their own dashboards.
Path Robotics works on aluminum welding at the Gulf Craft shipyard in Louisiana. The bar there is certification rather than adhesion.
“It’s not just can you tack a piece of aluminum together, it’s can you actually do it in such a way that it goes and passes all of the ABS, IMO, Coast Guard certifications associated with that work.”
NVIDIA supplies compute. Vibhav Altekar, Co-Founder and CTO, says most robotics compute runs on GPUs and NVIDIA dominates that market, but the deciding factor is the software layer rather than price. Training market share makes the transition to inference more seamless, which is why most robotics companies land in the same place.
The partnership also extends into simulation, where the two have discussed what next-generation tooling looks like. Altekar notes the ocean has resisted modeling for the same reasons weather has, and both remain active research problems.
Supply Chain & the Reindustrialization Constraint
Supply has required moving ahead of demand. Saronic bought out the majority of aluminum in the Louisiana area to build Marauder. Lambert says he has since pre-positioned steel suppliers for Port Alpha.
“I’ve reached out to critical suppliers for Port Alpha, make sure that the steel pipeline is in place, how we’re thinking about scaling, kind of moving those rocks ahead of the avalanche that is about to come.”
He identifies capital, contracting and execution as the three inputs that have to align. Capital is a chicken and egg problem, since demand signals have to precede market movement. On contracting, his position is that commercial industry follows the degree to which government leans in.
On inputs, casting and forging are the weakest links over the next 3 to 5 years, both having largely migrated outside the United States. Wire harnessing, historically done in Ukraine and Mexico, is beginning to return.
Labor & Certification
Lambert says the workforce problem is structural, not a hiring problem. Twenty years of certification and qualification requirements in defense manufacturing built a real quality system, and at the same time locked most of the available labor force out of the industry. He stops short of calling it gatekeeping, and says the quality system is worth keeping. The exclusion is the part that needs fixing.
His fix starts with the product rather than the training. Fewer parts, automated inspection and better pass rates mean a worker needs less experience to do the job right the first time.
“Less parts are good parts.”
The training that remains looks like apprenticeship, not classroom work. Lambert says adults learn differently from school-aged children, through risk, reward and outcomes, and that the model works as long as the company can scale it and make the connections quickly. His view on who can do the work is fairly simple. Someone who can change a tire should be able to build a Corsair or work on a Marauder.
Saronic also runs a large wire harnessing shop on site, one of the components Lambert names as having largely left the United States.
On where the industry is heading, he thinks physical production becomes the differentiator as software gets commoditized.
“Being successful in real space, doing hard tech, building real things, and manufacturing with real tangible items is gonna be the moat of the future.”
Selling to the Government
Rob Lehman, Co-Founder and CCO, owns growth, program management, government relations, contracts, proposals and the international portfolio.
Having served in uniform and then worked industry, he could tell a contracting officer or program manager that he had held their job, which he describes as removing the adversarial frame. His read is that acquisition works when there is trust between the two entities and a shared commitment to the outcome.
Saronic closed a CRADA, a cooperative research and development agreement, within its first 90 days. The instrument is a no-cost contract that grants access to customer requirements not otherwise public in exchange for codifying the relationship and managing the resulting intellectual property.
Lehman describes the sourcing method as fleet-level rather than top-down.
“We didn’t approach our initial customers at the PEO or now PAE level. We didn’t go from the Hill. It was really finding operators and understanding what are the things you’re being asked to do that you have to say, ‘Yes sir,’ or ‘Yes ma’am,’ and then you look at each other and say, ‘We don’t have what we need to be able to do that.’”
He also describes an intentional structural choice. Program operations and business development usually sit apart. At Saronic they are combined, on the reasoning that autonomous maritime is a small enough community that program teams and growth teams are talking to the same people.
Acquisition Reform
Lehman credits the current administration with putting money and consequences behind policy changes, against a historical pattern of NDAA language producing reports that go unread. What he sees as new is visibility into where processes break, down to the individual.
His emphasis is on accountability structures rather than incentives.
“You can’t have one human who’s not tied to the mission making arbitrary decisions based on a guidebook that doesn’t have any wiggle for them.”
His argument is that there is no real way to reward or punish a government employee, so accountability is the only lever left. A program manager is responsible for everything that happens or fails to happen in their unit. Lehman says that cannot be true if someone on their team can block a decision indefinitely.
He also sees a role for AI inside the acquisition workforce, on the basis that contracting officers repeatedly encounter regulations they are unaware permit the action they are declining. His read is that many default to what has built their careers, which is playing it safe under older rules, without full awareness of the maneuver space available.
Hardware & Software Co-Design
Saronic's first autonomous boat was a plastic box from Amazon with electronics inside. The process now runs backwards from how hardware is usually built. For Marauder, the generator set, propulsion stack and bow thruster were assembled and tested in a room about 8 months before the ship was built, so the software was already written and debugged. By the time the boat hit the water, the team was working on how operators would actually use it.
Altekar describes the operating principle as slowing software down and speeding hardware up. Software teams make opinionated infrastructure choices early. Hardware teams buy parts early, build hardware-in-the-loop systems and reduce requirement counts.
Removing the crew changes the design envelope directly. Altekar puts commercial boats built for humans at 0.4 to 0.6 Gs of acceleration and says Saronic has seen accelerations north of 20 Gs.
“All boats historically have been built for humans. And so when you actually thoughtfully choose to design hardware and software together, you actually get to reduce a lot of the complexity.”
Modular Open Systems
The architecture starts with a government requirement. Modular open systems, in Altekar’s description, comes down to whether the hardware and software interfaces are well-known and easy to use. A custom-designed connector or a proprietary protocol makes third-party payload integration slow. Standard interfaces make it fast.
Those choices set everything below them. Redundant power distribution lets an operator restart individual sensors remotely, which matters when a radar transmission would give away the boat's position, or when a camera simply needs a reboot. Next comes sensor selection and calibration, then where to put RF antennas so they do not interfere with each other. Naval architecture comes last, including where the electronics cabinet goes and how many Gs it takes in sea state 5 or 6.
Why Maritime Autonomy Lags
Two structural constraints separate maritime from other autonomy domains. Legacy marine components lack modern APIs and simulation tooling. Altekar recounts approaching one of the largest European marine design firms for simulation software and finding numerical instability on any hull under 50 feet.
Open source data is also scarce. Aerial and ground robotics benefit from public datasets, published research and commoditized parts, backed by hundreds of billions of dollars spent on self-driving cars. Maritime has neither. Commercial autonomous vessels still carry manning requirements, which removes the economic push, and acoustic and subsea work is classified quickly.
The ocean itself is punishing. On a 30-day mission, saltwater degrades the antennas, birds nest on the boat and marine growth builds up on the hull. Altekar says the surface is the hardest place to operate because it sits between air and water. Ten feet down is predictable. On top, the boat has to survive the rare bad wave, and every part of the system has to be ready for it.
Communications & Mission Autonomy
Every Saronic platform carries a PACE plan, a redundant set of communication paths so that a single failure does not sever the link. That includes both line of sight and beyond line of sight RF payloads, with Starlink and its defense variant Starshield among the options.
Altekar notes that the ocean produces jamming-like effects without an adversary. Heavy sea states and water on antennas show up as quality of service drops and dropped packets before anyone attempts interference.
Behavior on lost communications is set by the operator through open APIs rather than fixed in the product. A mission can continue, return to the last position with comms, loiter or return to base depending on how it is planned.
The Regulatory Gate
Both Lambert and Altekar point to regulation as the limiting factor. Autonomous boats still have manning requirements, which Altekar says removes the commercial incentive that would otherwise fund better tooling, data and research across the industry. Lambert wants that to change within a year, to the point where people see autonomous boats operating the way they now see self-driving cars.
The Next 12 Months
Lambert’s near-term list is construction at Port Alpha, auxiliary facilities in Brownsville for testing and inventory, and unannounced products.
Lehman points to recent operational impact, and to an outstanding item.
“What I’m looking forward to most is shaking the hands of those two Apache pilots. We still haven’t found out who they are.”
Altekar’s focus is volume. He argues that operating hundreds of vessels changes system behavior in ways that operating 5 or 10 does not, since a single unit gets babied and a fleet gets used. A fully unmanned fleet has not been done before. He also expects new markets to open as the cost of operating in the ocean falls, which he considers the point most of the market has yet to absorb.
Saronic is hiring!!
Want more? Check out the series:
Part I: Austin HQ + Factory Tour
→ Listen on X, Spotify, YouTube, Apple
Part II: Sit-Down w/ CEO Dino Mavrookas
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Part III: All 4 Co-Founders on Building a $9B Autonomous Prime
→ Listen on X, Spotify, YouTube, Apple
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