About Dino Mavrookas
Dino Mavrookas is the CEO and co-founder of Saronic. He served 11 years in the U.S. Navy SEALs (2004–2015), with his final five years on SEAL Team Six. After leaving the military, he transitioned to private equity at Vista Equity Partners, where he spent roughly five years before the pull of mission-driven work drew him back to defense. Dino describes his transition as a gradual realization, like being a “frog in boiling water,” that he wanted to dedicate his career to building solutions that protect the country. He founded Saronic in September 2022 with backing from 8VC and a slew of other high profile investors.
About Saronic
Saronic is a maritime autonomy and shipbuilding company headquartered in Austin, Texas. Founded in September 2022, the company designs, builds, and deploys autonomous surface vessels for the U.S. Navy and allied forces. In just over three years, Saronic has grown to approximately 1,000 employees across six U.S. locations and two international offices (Australia and UK). The company’s flagship products are Corsair, a 24-foot autonomous speedboat built at their 500,000 sq. ft. Austin facility (capacity: 2,000+ units/year), and Marauder, a 180-foot autonomous ship being built at their shipyard in Franklin, Louisiana. Saronic secured a $392 million contract with the U.S. Navy in late 2025, with the Secretary of the Navy publicly endorsing their approach as the model for future procurement. The company has announced Port Alpha, a $5B+ initiative to build the world’s largest and most advanced shipyard, with the goal of producing 10 million gross tons annually. This would effectively 100x current U.S. shipbuilding capacity.
Key Takeaways
1. Strong conviction is the best way to get lucky
Saronic filed its incorporation six weeks before the first USV strike in Ukraine. Even before this catalytic event validated the market, Dino had a deep, coherent thesis around the market. He had conducted extensive customer discovery at the micro-level, and intricate market analysis of the shipbuilding gap with China (230x capacity advantage). The story shows that while none of us can control the timing of the market, you can develop a strong point of view, that positions you to ride the wave when it arrives. For Dino, the primary question was simply when the government would start putting dollars behind shipbuilding.
2. Understand what business you’re in on Day 1
Saronic’s head of manufacturing, recruited from SpaceX, was their third employee. Dino hired him before they even built a prototype of their boat. This came from a conviction that “if you’re not thinking about manufacturing during the prototype phase, whatever you built is only guaranteed not to scale.” Recognizing the nature of the shipbuilding problem meant recognizing that production was the primary challenge to solve, even before design. That’s why today their product lines have 80% hardware consistency across boat platforms, modular ship designs with roughly seven core components, and a vertically integrated supply chain with zero Chinese components.
3. Demonstration is far more powerful than proposal, when operating ahead of demand
Saronic’s business model inverts the traditional defense procurement approach. Saronic invests its own capital to build products it has conviction in, then demonstrates working capability when the requirement materializes. Their $392M Navy contract is the result of a ready-to-build product delivered on an existing production line. The Secretary of the Navy called this “the model for how the Navy wants to do business.”
4. Software and autonomy are the unlock for competing with China on cost
China’s shipbuilding dominance (972 commercial ships vs. fewer than 10 for the U.S. in 2023) stems from lower labor costs, lower material costs, and economies of scale. Saronic’s answer is to redesign ships to give us a chance to compete. By removing humans from the vessel, you can strip out massive complexity: no crew quarters, simplified systems, modular construction. Saronic’s autonomous ships have roughly seven components. This lowers labor requirements, reduces material costs, and enables economies of scale through standardized production. Dino believes that this approach will make U.S.-built ships economically competitive on the global market for the first time in decades.
5. Commercial shipbuilding is a national security strategy, not a diversification play
Saronic’s Port Alpha initiative ($5B+ to build the world’s most advanced shipyard) is about creating wartime production capacity during peacetime. The Navy needs surge capacity for conflict scenarios, but it’s hard for any company to simply maintain idle shipyards. So, by filling peacetime capacity with commercial shipbuilding, a company like Saronic can offer a strategic reserve of capacity, which can be converted to defense production if needed. That excess capacity produced America’s World War II advantage. But it will only work this time if U.S. ships can compete economically. Hence, the focus on software and automation.
Saronic is certainly one of the most well-capitalized players in defense, and will be a name we circle back to in the months and years ahead.
For now, for more on Saronic:
Website: saronic.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/saronic-technologies/
Follow Dino: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dino-mavrookas-190244127/
For Careers: https://jobs.lever.co/saronic
For more Crossing the Valley: www.valleycrossers.com
