Silent Ventures Backed Saronic Raises $55M Series A, Will Redefine U.S. Maritime Superiority
Much of our work takes place behind the scenes, which is why Silent Ventures is excited to publicly announce our Seed and Series A investments in Saronic, alongside Caffeinated Capital, 8VC, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Lightspeed Venture Partners (LSVP), Point72, U.S. Innovative Technology, and Cubit Capital, among others.
Silent Ventures is a proud partner of 8VC and its Build Program, which provides us unparalleled visibility into future defense needs and novel incubations, and the privilege of working alongside ambitious EIRs — often military veterans — eager to disrupt the status quo. Saronic is the latest example of this frontier innovation ecosystem on display. In a Build lineage that includes predecessors Palantir and Epirus, Saronic is poised to reshape the naval battlefield by combining domain expertise, artificial intelligence, and hardware into a much-needed autonomous platform for U.S. maritime superiority.
Founded in 2022, and with $70M raised to date, Saronic’s founding team — led by CEO Dino Mavrookas (a former Navy SEAL) — has rapidly designed, developed, tested, and iterated three models of what the company describes as Autonomous Surface Vessels (ASVs). They include:
- Spyglass: a 6’ vessel equipped with advanced sensors and a configurable payload bay to enhance domain awareness and deliver diverse effects in contested waters. This system is specifically designed for tactical deployment, alone or in collaborative swarms, via at-sea launch and recovery from expeditionary craft.
- Cutlass: a 13’ vessel designed to transit significant distances with increased payload capacity and perform critical roles for the Joint Force, including deploying loitering munitions, communications, and identifying, classifying, and tracking other surface craft.
- Corsair: a stealth vessel which will be the third addition to Saronic’s expanding family of platforms, designed to satisfy highly urgent and impactful operational requirements for maritime unmanned systems.
Commonly referred to as affordable mass, these intelligent maritime machines arbitrage the quality vs. quantity paradox. “Attritable” by design, Saronic vessels meld impressive technical capabilities with low price points to enable rapid production at scale, solving the blatant (and long ignored) output gap that plagues America’s industrial base.
Unlike past and present maritime platforms, Spyglass, Cutlass, and Corsair employ high fidelity design frameworks complemented by modular hardware, dynamic payloads, and advanced AI capabilities. For the U.S. Navy and allied forces, this yields superior domain awareness, operating range, deterrence, and survivability.
Segmented across seven categories, Saronic ASVs reflect a new command and control strategy, focusing on what “will be” instead of “what is.” These tenants include:
- Launch: Dispatching from small craft, fleet assets, beachheads, or airdrops;
- Maneuver: Navigating any environment with adaptive path planning;
- Perceive: Identifying and tracking targets with passive sensors, advanced algorithms, and significant edge compute;
- Communicate: Leveraging resilient, multichannel communications to enable manned and unmanned teaming in contested environments;
- Execute: Delivering user-defined effects with diverse payload integrations;
- Enable: Complementing existing CONOPs or facilitating novel maritime engagements; and
- Recover: Quickly adapting to mission-specific requirements, with minimal downtime.
The net result? A highly capable, flexible, and inexpensive platform purpose-built to outperform adversarial technologies, evolve across new mission domains & directives, and thrive in chaos. In an increasingly polarized, complex, and competitive global security environment, Saronic provides the United States, and its allies, a revolutionary toolkit able to better detect, track, and respond to potential maritime threats in real-time.
Why We Invested
At Silent Ventures, we invest in operators building complex things to solve hard problems that actually matter. We invest in exceptional people building products that border on science fiction. We support concepts that are so uniquely impactful that their absence would fundamentally hinder humanity. Such companies tend to exemplify, among other characteristics, durability, compounding moats, and inherent unfair advantages. This is Saronic.
More specifically, Saronic solves a structurally acute military pain point (not resolved by larger NDAA carve outs): perpetual high costs, long lead times, and delays that jeopardize national security. The causes for “over cost, over budget” are well-documented and exacerbated by decades of expensive political conditioning that, ultimately, now plague our industrial base.
A prime example of this is, despite America outspending China by 3x, our naval vessel output is 35% that of the CCP’s PLAN. This is not a function of higher standards and more advanced technologies requiring additional build time, but is instead directly attributable to misaligned incentives, which result in rent-seeking practices that, more often than not, stagnate private sector innovation and degrade DoD capabilities.
Saronic has inverted the status quo with a comprehensive, vertically-integrated offering that’s agile, intelligent, cheap, and ready to manufacture (or deploy) with minimal notice. This is what the Allied warfighter deserves: the absolute best systems that preserve and protect Western interests, all while maximizing the likelihood he or she makes it home unscathed.
In due time, yet quicker than you expect, Saronic will serve as the bedrock platform that secures our oceans, ensures freedom of navigation, protects forward-deployed servicemen, projects democratic values, and deters maritime conflicts.
About Silent Ventures
Founded by Jackson Moses, Silent Ventures is an early stage venture firm that invests in exceptional founders building unrivaled aerospace, defense, and national security companies.
About Saronic
Saronic is building cutting-edge unmanned surface vehicles that enable maritime security and domain awareness by combining best-in-class hardware, software, and artificial intelligence into one scalable, fully integrated platform.
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