Saronic Founders: Autonomous Warships, China's 230X Advantage & Swarms of Robot Ships

**Jason Calacanis** (0:00)
All right, everybody, welcome back to the All-In interview series. I am thrilled, really thrilled, because Saronic is a defense company that has been doing amazing work. And we are so lucky to have the co-founders here on the program. Welcome to the program, Dino Mavroukis. How are you, sir?

**Dino Mavroukis** (0:16)
Doing well. Thanks for having us.

**Jason Calacanis** (0:18)
And your co-founder here, Vib Altakhar. Let's talk a little bit about Saronic, and we're going to get into everything. But you were in the news, because you're making autonomous ships. And one of these was used recently in the Strait of Hormuz, I understand. As your wealth grows, have you noticed how much more complex things get between investments, tax strategy and estate planning? Managing it all is a full-time job that you didn't ask for. Creative Planning can help. Their coordinated team of investment managers, CPAs, and affiliated estate attorneys can do much of the heavy lifting, so you don't have to. Creative Planning, where wealth works together. Go to creativeplanning.com/all-in.
I've got to start there, Dino. Tell us about the mission. Tell us what happened. This is the first time an autonomous ship has ever rescued folks in the field, and then we'll get back into your history and everything. But I think we got to start off with this story because it's incredible.

**Dino Mavroukis** (1:25)
It's just a huge story. I can't get into too many specifics of the operation and the mission for obvious reasons. But before we get into what it means for the country, what it means for our company, I mean, without saying the most important thing is that those two pilots came home safely, regardless of how they got there. Right. Now, what we were able to demonstrate through this partnership with the Navy, for us is the Navy actually trusted us. In this moment, lives are on the line. We're going to send this autonomous platform to go and rescue these folks. This is not a patrol. This is not maritime domain awareness. This is the highest stakes of the highest stakes. There's downed American pilots in the Strait of Hormuz. They're like Corsair, which you actually see right over my right shoulder, which is our 24 foot fully autonomous speedboat for those that don't know. So we're going to use that to rescue the pilots. That's actually like a milestone moment for the country. And I can tell you, I'll tell you a personal story firsthand of kind of what this means. But you know this, like leaving people behind in the US military, just it's not a thing. The US military does not do it. Right. Like I was in the Navy SEAL teams for 11 years from 2004 to 2015
My last five years were on SEAL Team 6
I personally experienced 2005, there were four SEALs trapped on a mountainside in Afghanistan, and the helicopter got shot down while going to rescue them. So what we were able to prove in this moment was that you can go and rescue people without putting additional soldiers in harm's way. That's the impact of what this had. That's what it means for the country and for our company. It was just an extremely proud moment where the Navy trusted us in this high-stakes environment.

**Jason Calacanis** (3:18)
Absolutely incredible. And obviously, thank you for your service.
And I know you can't get into too many details, but I've been reading all about it. And I got to wonder, when these two pilots, did they know that this was an autonomous ship and the ship comes rolling up and they're like, somebody sent them a message, hey, you can get picked up by the autonomous ship, grab the side of it, climb on board. What's the protocol for the autonomous ship picking up two folks? Are they swimming out to it? I just got to get a little color on this before it becomes a movie.

**Dino Mavroukis** (3:47)
I mean, it's the first time that it happened, right? And when a ship, when a boat pulls up to you and there's nobody on it, you know, you can very quickly deduce that it's fully, that it's an autonomous boat. And, you know, these pilots were in the water for I don't even know how long. They're in a completely contested environment. We're in a conflict with Iran. We're in the Straits of Hormuz and we can go through the dynamic there.
But they looked at this platform and said that that's my way home. Right? That's how I get out of here.

**Jason Calacanis** (4:17)
I love it. All right. Let's step back a bit here. You're an AVCL.
Vib, you've worked in this space for a while. You previously worked at Angeril, I understand. The mission, as I understand it, for the company is to greatly increase our ability in America to produce ships. And for people who don't know, the amount of tonnage, the number of ships that we're able to make in America and most Western countries is very low. But there's an adversary in the Pacific who is able to produce a lot of ships. It's known as the Chinese Communist Party. So maybe from first principles, you could just explain what you're building and why it's important and just how insane the incompetence of the West in terms of building ships has become. I mean, we are really bad at making ships right now. Am I correct?