Boston-based Blue Water Autonomy said it has raised $14 million in seed funding from three West Coast firms — Eclipse of Palo Alto, Calif., and Riot Ventures and Impatient Ventures of Los Angeles — as it emerged from stealth with plans to build autonomous ships for the U.S. Navy.
Founded by technologists who have previously worked at Amazon Robotics, iRobot and the U.S. Navy, the year-old startup is led by Rylan Hamilton, a US Navy veteran, and co-founder and CEO previously of 6 River Systems. In the Navy, Hamilton was an engineering and surface warfare officer before pivoting to robotics, working for Amazon and Shopify. Other co-founders include Navy veteran Austin Gray and Scott Miller, a former iRobot engineer.
“Sea power has been the bedrock of America’s security and prosperity for centuries,” said Hamilton, an alumnus of Harvard Business School. “We believe the entire maritime economy is in need of transformation — it starts with supporting the U.S. Navy which needs dynamic industrial partners to bring top technology to its sailors, including ocean-going, fully autonomous ships.”
Over the past year, Blue Water Autonomy says it has developed a full-stack “autonomy” suite, commenced salt-water testing, and developed concept ship designs. The company initially aims to build a 100-foot autonomous ship that can travel thousands of miles without a crew, with eventual capability of carrying 100 tons. It plans to use seed funding to expand its engineering team, accelerate ship testing, and integrate different payloads onto its platform.
Hamilton told Bloomberg the company’s mission is comparable to the Liberty ships the United States made during World War II, and said his company’s ships are designed for mass manufacturing. “We’ll need to deliver these at scale,” Hamilton said. “The Navy needs to make hundreds of these.”
“The U.S. military needs more than incremental improvements to meet the moment and maintain its status on the global stage,” said Seth Winterroth, partner at Eclipse. “Autonomous ships are critical to enable the Navy to continue securing deterrence given the threat of China and Russia and the importance of shipping lanes in the Pacific.” Winterroth termed the Blue Water team as “a rare combination of roboticists and Navy veterans that positions them to be a critical partner to the Navy, the entire Department of Defense.”
The geopolitical situation and a recent executive order from President Donald Trump are also expected to benefit Blue Water, as the United States focuses on autonomous ships. The president is also to dispatch Elon Musk’s efficiency squad to investigate how the US Navy fell so far behind in building vessels, Bloomberg said, adding that Ambassador Katherine Tai recently said the country builds fewer than five ships a year, while China constructs more than 1,700.
