Saronic Technologies has closed a $1.75 billion Series D round, bringing its valuation to $9.25 billion. Kleiner Perkins led the investment, with new participants including Advent International, Bessemer Venture Partners, DFJ Growth, and BAM Elevate joining the round.
Existing backers — 8VC, Caffeinated Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Elad Gil, and Franklin Templeton — all continued their support. The scale of the round reflects growing investor confidence in autonomous maritime systems as a serious infrastructure priority, not just a defense technology bet.
The U.S. has lost significant shipbuilding capacity over the past several decades. That erosion has become harder to ignore as geopolitical tensions rise and supply chain vulnerabilities at sea become more visible. Saronic argues that recovering that capacity requires more than policy commitment — it requires a fundamentally different approach to how ships are designed and built.
"Over the past decades, the U.S. has experienced a steady erosion of its ability to build ships and manufacture critical maritime infrastructure," said Dino Mavrookas, Co-Founder and CEO of Saronic. "We are confronting this challenge with a fundamentally new model of American shipbuilding, one that integrates first-principles engineering, advanced manufacturing, and software-defined production to deliver autonomous vessels with unprecedented speed, precision, and scale."
A substantial portion of the new funding will go toward accelerating Port Alpha, the company's next-generation shipyard, alongside the expansion of existing production facilities in Louisiana and Texas. Saronic is not simply building vessels — it is building the manufacturing backbone to produce them consistently and at volume.
The capital will also fund continued development across Saronic's portfolio of autonomous surface vessels, from the 24-foot Corsair to the 180-foot Marauder. With demand growing from U.S. and allied customers for platforms with greater range, endurance, and payload capacity, the company plans to scale its vessel family further. It is also exploring solutions at the intersection of surface and subsurface operations, pushing into new areas of the maritime domain.
Saronic Technologies was founded to address one specific problem: the United States' declining ability to build and field advanced maritime vessels at speed. The company operates with an autonomy-first design philosophy, meaning ships are engineered around software and autonomous systems from the ground up rather than adapted afterward.
In the past year alone, Saronic raised a $600 million Series C at a $4 billion valuation, secured a $392 million production contract with the U.S. Navy, and delivered the first hull of its 180-foot Marauder in under six months after acquiring the facility to build it. The company has expanded its Austin headquarters to more than 500,000 square feet, opened offices in San Diego and Washington D.C., and launched operations in the UK and Australia.
Headcount has surpassed 1,300 people. The Louisiana shipyard acquisition, backed by a $300 million commitment to a 300,000-square-foot expansion, is expected to create 1,500 jobs in the region. That kind of job creation alongside defense output is precisely the argument Saronic makes for why autonomy-led shipbuilding can serve both security and economic goals.
Kleiner Perkins partner Ilya Fushman captured the investment thesis directly: "Maritime dominance isn't just about technology — it requires the production capacity to field it at scale. Those two things rarely come together. What makes Saronic special is that they're building both: autonomous ships designed from day one to push the boundaries of what's possible, and the manufacturing infrastructure to produce them consistently. That's what turns a technical breakthrough into an enduring platform advantage."
For Kleiner Perkins and the broader investor group — which now spans Advent International, Bessemer Venture Partners, DFJ Growth, BAM Elevate, 8VC, Caffeinated Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Elad Gil, and Franklin Templeton — the bet is on a company that has already proven it can build and not just pitch.
