Saronic's 4 Co-Founders on Building a $9.25B Shipbuilder | Part III

**Doug Lambert** (0:08)
Being successful in real space, doing hard tech, building real things, and manufacturing with real tangible items is going to be the moat of the future.

**Vibhav Altekar** (0:17)
I think a lot of commercial boats, you kind of target the human beings to take like 0.4 to 0.6 Gs maybe. Our boats, we've seen accelerations north of 20 Gs before. A human would not take that. It would be very dangerous for a human to be on that if it's going that fast.

**Rob Lehman** (0:29)
The technology that we're creating is having an impact on real people, real operations. I'm looking forward to shaking the hands of those two Apache pilots.

**Dino Mavrookas** (0:37)
What we're building at Saronic will not only provide more capabilities faster, but it will save the taxpayer hundreds of billions of dollars by driving down costs as well.

**Molly O'Shea** (0:56)
To set the table, we talked a bit about your stats when we started the last walking tour. And if you haven't watched it, you should watch it. But so you're now at over a $9 billion valuation. You raised $2.6 billion.
You just announced this was a little debate. Is it still going to be fresh in a month? I think so. But Port Alpha, $3 billion Port Alpha. So I guess to bring all that to focus against the backdrop of what's going on in America, I'd love for you to lay out kind of the stats that we're working with. Palantir CTO, Shom, just talked about this, but we're ratioed by China in shipbuilding.

**Dino Mavrookas** (1:34)
It's actually pretty crazy. So China outbuilds the US 230 to one.
The naval fleet that we have today is actually shrinking. So there's right around 290 ships in our naval fleet. In 2018, Congress actually set a statutory minimum of 355 ships. That was eight years ago. And we're going in the wrong direction. In 2024, the Navy actually looked at it and said, we don't actually need 355, we need 381 And these are just manned ships, let alone all the unmanned ships that we're going to need in our fleet. You see the president's budget request for $1.5 trillion.
They put out a maritime executive order and the maritime action plan specifically around shipbuilding. You have the Ships Act, which is in Congress, which is focused on obviously the shipbuilding industry. So there's a lot of focus on defense, defense technology, the industrial base, and shipbuilding, and things are changing. But when you look at the budget today, just look at the Department of War's budget, we talked about the request for $1.5 trillion and where the budget is today, right around a trillion dollars for 26
One percent went towards autonomy. So that just gives you a sense of how far we actually have to go. And in terms of the bureaucracy and what needs to change, you're getting a lot of push from the top down, from leadership, from the administration, which I just highlighted, from Capitol Hill to invest in things that are not only much more economical, but also scalable. And when you talk about ships, one of the biggest examples is aircraft carriers, right? They take over 10 years to make one. And that number increases by the day, actually, because the program is just later and later and later. And the cost keeps going up and up and up.
I was actually quoting 13 billion dollars for an aircraft carrier. And that was an event where the president spoke just last week. And he quoted 19 billion dollars. And I was like, what is happening to the budget here? So you have a lot of focus from Congress, because there's a 30 year shipbuilding plan in the Navy right now. We talked about going from 290 to 381, over 30 years. That'll cost 1.2 trillion dollars if we can even execute as a country in the first place on that plan. What we're building at Saronic will not only provide more capabilities faster, but it'll save the taxpayer hundreds of billions of dollars by driving down costs as well. I'll give you a fun stat.
I'll laugh at myself a little bit. I didn't actually know this. The Army actually has more boats than the Navy does.
But we're focused on all the services, Navy, Army, Marine Corps, Coast Guard. How can we support the Air Force and Combat Search and Rescue and other things? So we're focused on the military at large. The Navy was our initial and still is our largest customer. And as we're building autonomous surface vessels, that makes a ton of sense. How do we redefine what that Naval fleet of the future can look like and should look like? And we're figuring that out together in partnership with the Navy, but very focused on all the services, very focused on commercial.