Speaker
Dino Mavroukas
Appearances over time
1 episodes
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1
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Quotes & moments
China can build 23 million gross tons of ships per year versus the US's 100,000 gross tons, a 230-to-1 advantage.
China has grown from 5% of global shipbuilding capacity 30 years ago to 57% today, and that share is still rising.
The US Navy has only 296 ships today, below the congressional statutory minimum of 355 set in 2018, and is shrinking — retiring 19 ships last year while building only 9.
The United States built only 5 commercial ships last year, while China delivered over 1,000.
A US Navy destroyer costs $3 billion and takes 6–8 years to build, fielding ~100 VLS tubes; Saronic's Marauder can field 320 VLS tubes per year at a fraction of the cost.
Saronic plans to build 20 Marauders per year at its Louisiana shipyard, each carrying 16 VLS tubes, yielding 320 tubes per year versus 15 from a destroyer.
Dino Mavroukas noted that only 1% of the Department of War's budget is allocated to autonomous systems — far below what he believes is necessary.
In roughly 4 years, Saronic has raised $2.5 billion in private capital to fund R&D and shipyard development without relying on cost-plus government contracts.
Saronic's new Port Alpha shipyard in Brownsville, Texas will start on an 800-acre plot — already the largest shipyard in the United States — with potential to scale to 4,000 acres.
Saronic's Port Alpha project in Brownsville is expected to create 10,000 jobs over the next 10 years and involve billions in investment.
Saronic can already produce 2,000 Corsair autonomous speedboats per year from its Austin manufacturing facility.
A ship built in the United States costs 5 to 6 times more than the same ship built in China due to subsidized raw materials, labor, and industrial infrastructure.
By investing in product design, processes, and new shipyards, Saronic believes it can cut the cost of a ship built in the US by half — e.g. $300M to under $150M.
Two American pilots downed in the Strait of Hormuz were rescued by a fully autonomous 24-foot speedboat with no one on board. The Navy trusted Saronic's Corsair in its highest-stakes scenario ever — and it delivered.
When you strip the humans out of a warship, you don't just save space — you eliminate entire subsystems and unlock radical design freedom. Saronic's Corsair can travel 1,000 nautical miles and withstand G-forces no crewed vessel could handle.
A single US Navy destroyer costs $3 billion, takes 6–8 years to build, and fields roughly 100 VLS missile tubes. Twenty Saronic Marauders, built in a single year, field 320 tubes at a fraction of that cost. The math destroys the case for legacy procurement.
Under cost-plus contracts, a defense prime makes more money the longer a project takes and the more it costs. That's not a bug — it's been the system for decades. Saronic is building on firm fixed-price contracts with private capital instead.
Iran's strategy in the Strait of Hormuz relies on cheap mass — fast attack vessels, drones, floating mines — to overwhelm traditional manned warships. Saronic's answer is to out-mass them with autonomous Corsairs, built at 2,000 per year, that can counter every threat vector without putting a single sailor at risk.
China is arming robot dogs and autonomous vessels with no ethical guardrails. Saronic's approach embeds policy thresholds directly in the software — AI identifies and recommends, but humans authorize. The question is whether those thresholds can flex fast enough in a real Taiwan Strait conflict.
Saronic is building Port Alpha in Brownsville, Texas — an 800-acre shipyard that is already the largest in the US, with the potential to scale to 4,000 acres. The project will create 10,000 jobs over 10 years and is designed from the ground up to build autonomous warships at industrial scale not seen since World War II.
Austin sits at the rare intersection of software talent and industrial labor — software engineers, AI researchers, and oil-and-gas workers within driving distance of each other. That's the reason Saronic is there, and why Port Alpha in Brownsville, next to SpaceX's Starbase, makes so much sense.
The American shipbuilding workforce has been hollowed out for decades — most yards still run pen-and-paper processes. Saronic gives every welder and pipe fitter the same benefits and equity as its Silicon Valley engineers, and designs its ships to be assembled quickly by upskilled workers.
In traditional US shipbuilding, design and manufacturing are handled by separate companies — a split that locks in inefficiency and sole-source supplier dependency. Saronic's vertical integration means naval architects, software engineers, and welders co-design the ship and the yard simultaneously, the way chipmakers do hardware-software co-design.
America's shipbuilding industry has collapsed to 100,000 gross tons per year. China builds 23 million. That 230-to-1 gap isn't just an economic embarrassment — in a war, China's commercial shipyards flip to military production overnight.
Saronic's name comes from the Saronic Gulf, where the Battle of Salamis was fought after Thermopylae. Wildly outnumbered Greeks lured a massive Persian fleet into a narrow strait and used smaller, more maneuverable ships to win. It's the exact playbook Saronic is running against China today.
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- Business 20%
- Government 20%
- Society & Culture 10%
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