Blue Water Autonomy is building autonomous ships for the U.S. Navy and commercial customers.
Their team has launched 100+ hardware products, built some of America’s most complex ships, and fielded millions of robots. Some of these are in use in your home, others on Ukraine’s battlefields.
In this video
Rylan Hamilton, CEO & Co-Founder, shares the details on Blue Water and what it’s like to work there.
We discuss:
- Details about Blue Water Autonomy & how the service works
- Why it Matters
- Details on the team
- The culture at Blue Water Autonomy
Video Transcript
We actually started the company last year, but we were kind of in stealth for a while. And what’s different about Blue Water is we’re designing and building autonomous ships. I call it like the largest mobile robot in the world, but unlike the mobile robots of Six River Systems or at Amazon Robotics, instead of building a robot that’s in the tens of thousands of dollars, we’re building something that’s in the tens of millions of dollars. And so at Six River, we actually created our first robot in 90 days. It was built of 8020 and devboards. We actually 3D printed the shell to make it look really nice. But that’s not something you can do just to build a ship in 90 days.
And so myself and two of the other co-founders, we started the company in 2024 and we spent the first six months just doing a bunch of research. We researched the supply base. We researched the technology and then we also researched the customer. And we really wanted to make sure that when we started to build out the technology and kind of our first test vessel that we hit the mark. And so we actually spent a lot of 24 kind of like in a conference room hold up doing a bunch of research and getting really smart. And it wasn’t until sort of the end of 24 and the beginning of 25 that really started to accelerate and that’s when we announced our seed round.
We’re making today’s fleet even better. So, we’re not trying to say get rid of all the man warships. In fact, our Navy builds the best warships by far in the entire world. We build aircraft carriers. We build destroyers, nuclear submarines, you name it, they’re world class. And we’ve had a world-class navy for the last 100 years. But we need to adopt to the times. And we’re seeing all these different types of autonomous systems come out. And our focus is to how can we kind of complement today’s bluewater navy. So think about like a guided missile destroyer. Well, you know what’s better than one guided missile destroyer? A guided missile destroyer with four kind of like 200 foot 150 foot autonomous ships basically kind of sailing alongside it and they can carry extra missiles, they can carry radars, they can carry extra sensors.
And the way I describe to kind of like my friends and family is like you know think about a chessboard. Our Navy today has the really expensive pieces on the back where it’s the castle or the knight, the queen, the king, you name it, the bishop. These are like the pieces that can do a lot of damage on a chessboard. But what our Navy needs is it needs the pawns. And so pawns don’t replace all the pieces on the back of the chessboard. They complement it and they’re the first pieces that go and kind of, you know, signal where the enemy is and what it’s doing. And so we’re basically creating the pawns for today’s fleet. They’re lower cost. They’re easier to build because we don’t have people on them. They’re smaller side. We can upgrade them over time and they’re multi-m missission. And so I’d like to say we came up with this idea. We didn’t. But basically we’ve been partnering with the Navy and kind of hearing their feedback and this is where the Navy wants to go. The challenge the Navy has had is actually moving the tech forward. And so what we’re doing is we’re taking private capital from companies like Google Venture and saying we’re going to make our better on ourselves and if it doesn’t work, don’t pay us. But we’re going to take the best talent from places like Boston, people that have built companies like Amazon Robotics and iRoot and take that talent and then go apply it to this class of vessel.
So we started the company, we got there, you know, with the seed money, we got the team together, we built, we basically have just outside of Boston, we have this 150 ton test vessel where we get to test all the hardware and the software and be really agile and iterative in all our testing. But at the beginning of this year, Congress actually, you know, agreed with companies like us, we’re basically, when I say lobbying, it’s bas basically founderled sales. It’s me and Austin walking the halls of Congress trying to get into any congressman or senator’s office and explain what we’re doing and saying, “Could you please put a little bit budget for this type of ship? It could do these different missions in different ways.” And then we talk to people in the Navy. we’d be like, “Hey, like our background is this and like we think we could solve the tech.” So, we convinced people to actually make a bet again on this class of ship.
And at the beginning of this year, there’s a reconciliation bill where actually the most money for autonomous systems for the Navy was actually for the type of ship that we’re designing and building. And so that was the beginning of the year and we used that as proof to investors to say, “We’re not crazy. In fact, we’ve picked this is a really good time and we’re one of a few companies that’s focused on this area, but what we’re building is it’s expensive. Like it’s not like we’re building a mobile robot and we need some capital to really accelerate this. And so we raised a $50 million series A led by Google Ventures.
So we are what we are building is hard but we’ve basically decomposed the problem into different components and then we’ve found the best people in industry to go solve those different problems. So when it comes to robotics and automation and software we’re pulling from kind of the Boston community. So again as mentioned Amazon robotics and iroot and Boston Dynamics and my previous company Six River Systems. We’re taking all that talent to basically solve the robotics problem. On the ship building side, we just hired our chief operating officer, Tim Glonatis, who spent 20 years building, you know, the largest navy ships that are out there, whether it’s guided missile destroyers or supply ships. And then on the ship design, we actually took a team of people who worked on the most advanced autonomous ship. It’s built by DARPA. It’s called the Defiant. It’s doing sea trials right now in the Pacific. And so we’ve basically, you know, accumulated some of the best people that’s out there and we have capital to basically go solve this problem. And so, all the people on our team have kind of done this before in a way, but when we pull them all together, I think we have the most compelling team to actually go design and build autonomous ships, but that’s not going to make it like easy, but it definitely helps us kind of like cheat, you know, cheat a little bit because we’re not doing it for the first time.
So I think I’m taking the best from previous companies that I’ve been at whether it’s like Vistar Print or it’s Amazon Robotics or it’s Six River Systems. And today, you know, we’re relatively early. We’ve definitely moved beyond that seedstage company and we have a team that’s like highly capable and and in the process of actually launching our first full scale ship next year. But there’s something really magical about kind of like a team full of ninjas. And so, you know, if I were to have a company of 500 or a thousand people, the challenge with some of those large organizations is just inherently you build like layers of like bureaucracy and decision m making takes longer and then you just hire sometimes political people who are more concerned about how many people report to them and what their title is and less about the mission and the outcome. And in today’s kind of culture, it’s like, you know, it doesn’t matter where the idea came from. information travels really quickly and people don’t feel encumbered by spending a lot of time filling out reports. Their focus is on building and the best engineers that are out there or some of the best love building. And at Blue Water Autonomy, we are all about building really cool stuff that’s really pushing sort of the boundary and that allows us to attract the best engineers because they want to build. And it kind of goes back to like the early part of my career where like I am not the type of person who wants to be behind a computer doing emails and spreadsheets all day long. I like to build. And so that is what is special about companies that have private capital and that are kind of startups is that we spend 80 or 90% of our time building. And so going back to Blue Water, our culture is about building. It’s about team. It’s about the mission. And then by the way, I think a lot of us have salt running through our veins.