Building Boats in Austin
Saronic Co-Founder & CEO Dino Mavrookas takes us on a tour of the company’s 420,000 sqft autonomous boat factory in Austin, Texas.
→ Listen on X, Spotify, YouTube, Apple
Founded in 2022, Saronic has raised $2.6B at a last valuation of $9.25B. We walk the Corsair production line, which has capacity for 2,000 autonomous boats per year, and climb aboard Mirage, its new 52-foot vessel with 2,500+ nautical miles of range and 3,500 lbs of payload capacity.
Dino breaks down Saronic’s vertically integrated hardware + software strategy, its 180-foot Marauder autonomous ship, and Port Alpha, the massive new shipyard it’s building in Brownsville, Texas.
Plus: why China outbuilds the U.S. 230:1, lessons from SpaceX manufacturing, the future of autonomous warfare, and how Saronic went from testing its technology on an $800 Amazon raft to building autonomous vessels at scale.
This is Part I of a III-Part Saronic dive.
Sit-downs with Dino + all 4 co-founders to follow.
𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒
(00:00) Dino Mavrookas, Co-Founder & CEO at Saronic Technologies
(00:55) Saronic's $2.6B raise
(03:14) 7 Buildings, One mission
(06:43) Watching Corsairs get built
(09:04) How Saronic finds and trains talent
(10:48) Why Saronic's boats are different
(14:55) From factory floor to customer
(15:48) Using autonomy in real missions
(17:39) Building ships with zero room for failure
(19:06) The Biggest bottleneck in autonomy testing
(19:57) Saronic's newest boat
(22:57) The $800 raft that started it all
(26:08) From boats to building actual ships
(30:43) If not CEO, then what?
(31:48) The culture behind long hours
Brought to you by:
Brex—The intelligent finance platform: cards, expenses, travel, bill pay, banking—wrapped into a high-performance stack. Built for scale. Trusted by OpenAI, Anthropic, Vercel, Granola, Deepgram, & Sourcery.. teams that move fast AF. visit → brex.com/sourcery
Applied Aerospace—As global competition intensifies, strategic leadership demands space and defense technologies that deliver enduring national capabilities. At Applied Aerospace & Defense, we unleash the power of advanced manufacturing with unmatched scale and agility. Visit: applied-ad.com
Zone—develops next-generation data center campuses, partnering with AI companies, site developers and technology leaders to bring compute online faster and at scale. Visit: zonefrontier.com
Turing—Turing partners with frontier AI labs to improve model capabilities in coding, reasoning, tool use, & multimodality, as well as with Fortune 500 enterprises to build & deploy end-to-end agentic AI systems in mission-critical workflows Visit: turing.com/sourcery
VCX—VCX is the public ticker for private tech, allowing investors of all sizes to invest in venture capital. View The Portfolio at GetVCX.com
Deel—Deel is the global people platform that helps startups hire, manage, pay, and equip anyone, anywhere. Trusted by more than 35,000 fast-growing companies, Deel is the people platform that just works, so teams can scale without the chaos. Visit: deel.com/sourcery
Public-–Investing platform Public just launched Generated Assets, which lets you turn any idea into an investable index with AI. With Generated Assets, you can build, backtest, refine, and invest in any thesis with AI. Gone are the days of one-size-fits-all ETFs. Try it today: public.com/sourcery
Inside Saronic’s Austin HQ + Factory
Saronic was founded in 2022. Four years later, the company occupies 420,000 sqft across 7 buildings in Austin, Texas, employs 1,800 people across 9 locations, and has raised roughly $2.6B at a $9.25B valuation. In July 2026 it announced Port Alpha, a $3B+ shipyard on 835 acres at the Port of Brownsville.
Co-Founder and CEO Dino Mavrookas walked me through the Austin campus, from the Corsair production line to the vessels that come after it.
The Campus
Saronic moved into the Austin campus roughly 7 months ago, added the Corsair production line over to the new facility about a month before the tour, and has already filled the space.
Two of the 7 buildings hold engineering, finance and G&A. Four are production, manufacturing and industrial space. The seventh sits between them and functions as shared space for lunch, all-hands meetings and cross-team work.
“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. So while it’s technically not one roof, it’s one campus, and everybody works together.”
The layout is intended to keep engineering close to the floor. When something stalls in production, the hardware engineers are a short walk away and can redesign against the problem the same day.
Saronic’s first space, occupied less than 4 years ago, was a 5,000 sqft garage that held about 20 people.
“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.’ ”
The Corsair Line
The main Corsair line runs as a linear flow. Hulls sit on one side and top caps on the other, each workstation completes a defined set of steps before the boat moves to the next, and finished vessels leave through the bay door at the end and ship to customers.
The line I walked carries the capacity to build 2,000 Corsairs per year. A second line on the other side of the columns, currently running Mirage and other products, could double that figure.
Saronic’s head of manufacturing spent 10 years at SpaceX. The design philosophy he brought is that a linear flow makes bottlenecks easy to spot on a walkthrough.
“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.”
The building itself is a plain rectangle, which Mavrookas says is intentional, because the model is meant to be replicated quickly, including with allies overseas.
“You know, it’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.”
Corsair In Combat
Saronic announced a Navy production contract worth more than $392M in December 2025, and Task Force 59 began fielding Corsairs in the Middle East in late March 2026.
Two operations have been made public. In June 2026, a Corsair located and recovered 2 downed US Army aircrew after their AH-64 Apache went down off Oman, which was the first combat search and rescue completed by an autonomous system. On July 12th 2026, US Central Command confirmed that 3 Corsair one-way attack drones struck the submarine and ship maintenance facility at Iran’s Bandar Abbas Naval Base and destroyed a docked Iranian submarine.
Mavrookas served in the Navy SEAL teams from 2004 to 2015, and he cited a specific operation when explaining why the rescue mattered to him.
“In 2005, there was 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.”
He measures the product by mission completion, and argues that commanders will fall back on manned platforms if an autonomous system falls short of that.
“If you aren’t completing missions, you’re not actually giving commanders optionality. 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.”
Hardware, Software & Reliability
When I asked what makes Saronic different, Mavrookas pointed at the integration layer.
“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.”
Reliability is engineered to what the team calls N+1 redundancy, and every piece of hardware on the platform is instrumented, reporting everything from oil level and temperature to radio performance and comms bandwidth. Saronic runs 3 test sites in the US alongside international ranges in Australia and the UK, and has logged more than 25,000 test hours on Corsair alone, a figure that excludes government ranges and combat operations.
Development pace is limited by time on the water.
“Time on the water. There’s only so much that you can test in simulation. You test stuff in simulation, you get to the 80% answer. Real time testing is, by definition, real time, and so you have to be out in the ocean. The ocean literally breaks everything, so we have to make sure that we’re building extremely reliable platforms.”
Work on the autonomy stack started early, on hardware the company bought retail straight from Amazon.
“It was an $800 raft that we bought on Amazon. And it was just this plastic fishing boat, and our software engineers took $30,000 worth of cameras, batteries, electronics & everything else, & they built out the software stack.
They built out the autonomy while we were building out the hardware in parallel.”
That stack now carries across every platform the company builds, which is why new hardware does not require rebuilding the software layer from scratch.
The Platform Ladder
Corsair is 24 feet long, travels 1,000 nautical miles and carries 1,000 lbs of payload.
Mirage is 52 feet, and by volume it is roughly 15 times larger. It carries 3,500 lbs with a 2,500 nautical mile range, and the back half of the vessel is open deck given over to payload. The first Mirage launched about a week and a half before my visit and is in sea trials, and the second was on the floor while we walked.
Marauder, at 180 feet, is built in Franklin, Louisiana, at a yard Saronic acquired in early 2025 and where it is investing $300M to add 300,000 sqft of production capacity. The yard was closing when Saronic bought it, with the owners retiring and the workforce being laid off, and headcount there has since gone from 30 to between 300 and 400.
Saronic tested all-electric and hybrid diesel-electric configurations before settling on diesel. The company’s first product, Spyglass, was a 6-foot all-electric mini jet ski that could not deliver the range or payload the military wanted, and it became a subscale demonstrator that fed into Corsair.
Mavrookas says the larger vessels came out of the same iterative process, and that he would have ruled them out early on.
“If you asked me four years ago if we would ever build ships, I would’ve said,
‘No, you’re crazy. That’s why we’re actually building Corsair.’”
$3B+ Port Alpha & The Shipbuilding Problem
The case for the shipyard rests on a set of numbers Mavrookas returns to repeatedly.
“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.”
He dates the decline to two events. In 1981, the removal of a commercial shipbuilding subsidy pushed US yards out of the international commercial market, and the supply chain and workforce went with it. In 1993, the Navy’s budget fell by 41%.
“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, right? All over the country. It’s ‘cause they actually used to be Navy yards.”
Port Alpha was announced on July 16th 2026 after a year-long nationwide site search. It sits on 835 acres at the Port of Brownsville with room to expand to nearly 4,400 acres, and planned investment exceeds $3B. Construction begins this year and operations are scheduled to start in 2028.
The initial build-out targets 150,000 gross tons of capacity, against a current total US shipbuilding capacity of 100,000 gross tons, and Mavrookas says the yard can eventually reach 2 million gross tons. It will handle 850 foot vessels when it opens and expand to support ships over 1,200 feet. Saronic projects up to 10,000 direct jobs over the next decade.
On what the yard will actually produce, Mavrookas points toward scalable platforms and commercial hulls.
“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’s companies that build traditional aircraft carriers today.
What we wanna do is supplement that with platforms that can scale in really large numbers, and we also wanna focus on commercial shipbuilding.”
Workforce
Workforce is the reason Saronic chose a landlocked city, and Mavrookas splits the problem into two parts.
Talent for small vessel manufacturing already exists in the US and closely resembles auto manufacturing. Talent for shipbuilding is where the bottleneck sits, and Saronic’s approach is to simplify the design so the job requires less experience.
“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.’”
When I asked which job he would take if he were not CEO, Mavrookas chose the production line. He studied computer and electrical engineering in college before 9/11, in his junior year, pushed him toward the military, and he still comes down to work a station, though he suspects the team is hoping he does not create work for them later.
“Corsairs are being used in a combat environment right now. That’s our customer. That’s who we’re delivering for. That’s not a nine-to-five.”
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
→ Listen on X, Spotify, YouTube, Apple
Part III: All 4 Co-Founders on Building a $9B Autonomous Prime
→ Listen on X, Spotify, YouTube, Apple
The material presented on Molly O’Shea’s website are my opinions only and are provided for informational purposes and should not be construed as investment advice. It is not a recommendation of, or an offer to sell or solicitation of an offer to buy, any particular security, strategy, or investment product. Any analysis or discussion of investments, sectors or the market generally are based on current information, including from public sources, that I consider reliable, but I do not represent that any research or the information provided is accurate or complete, and it should not be relied on as such. My views and opinions expressed in any website content are current at the time of publication and are subject to change. Past performance is not indicative of future results.
Paid Endorsement. Brokerage services by Open to the Public Investing Inc, member FINRA & SIPC. Advisory services by Public Advisors LLC, SEC-registered adviser. Crypto trading provided by Zero Hash LLC, licensed by the NYSDFS. Generated Assets is an interactive analysis tool by Public Advisors. Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice. See disclosures at public.com/disclosures/ga. Matched funds must remain in your account for at least 5 years. Match rate and other terms are subject to change at any time.