Blue Water Bets $50M That Big Ships Will Go Driverless Too

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The sea has always been central to global power, shaping both trade and security. Today, with China’s shipbuilding capacity outpacing that of the United States and asymmetric threats like drones and anti-ship missiles rising, the Navy faces a stark dilemma: how to project strength without placing $2 billion destroyers in harm’s way.

Into that challenge sails Blue Water Autonomy, a Boston-based startup founded by Navy veteran and robotics entrepreneur Rylan Hamilton. Its solution: autonomous ships.

“If you look at the geopolitical threats that are out there, and especially with the current administration, all the focus is on the Pacific and China,” Hamilton told PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster. “If you take a historian’s viewpoint, maritime dominance has been important for the United States over the last a hundred years.”

Against that backdrop, he told Webster that the U.S. has been lagging behind some of its rival nations. China’s shipbuilding capacity is 200 times greater than that of the United States. Their navy is at a similar tonnage to the U.S.

“We still have the best Navy in the world, but if we ever got into a conflict,” said Hamilton, “we don’t have the ability to repair and build ships at the pace that China does, especially manned ships.”

Why the Navy Wants Autonomous Ships

By building autonomous ships, the company envisions improving the Navy’s operations, with a scalable seaworthy platform that can tackle various functions at sea. The model also has implications for supply chains and international trade.

Hamilton said autonomous ships are smaller because they don’t carry people, and that makes them easier and faster to build. They can be built in a matter of months rather than years because of the relatively simple design, which boils down to a propulsion plant, with steel around it. “You put the payloads on top, in containers and you send it out to sea,” Hamilton told Webster.

Blue Water is designing an autonomous ship that can be built in every region of the U.S., he said, without having to joust for capacity at the Navy’s big shipyards in Maine or San Diego.

Hamilton pointed out that autonomy technology has matured beyond expensive, one-off experiments. “Traditionally there hasn’t been a huge market for maritime autonomy in terms of [simply] making a ship more expensive with additional sensors on top of it,” he explained to Webster, “but there’s been a shift where this technology’s becoming more commoditized, so you don’t need thousands of people to go and write software.”

From Navy Officer to Robotics Entrepreneur

Hamilton served four years in the Navy before co-founding Six River Systems, a warehouse robotics company acquired by Amazon. Those experiences informed his approach to reliability. “We had to take a proof of concept and make it into something that a warehouse associate could use every single day without an engineer standing in the corner in case something bad happened,” he said.  “And so that’s when I kind of got inspired. I said, ‘there’s something here.’”

He described the design philosophy with a Boston analogy: “Designing and building an autonomous ship is like buying a house on Beacon Hill. You have two options. You can either buy a really historic house and you can gut the entire thing and then pretend that it’s modern or you can just build it from the ground up … we’re doing the latter, which is much more cost-effective and much more modern.”

Hamilton emphasized that autonomous ships will not replace sailors. “There are certain missions … like visit, board, search and seizure … where you need people to get in a boat and go look at that other boat. An autonomous ship can have a camera on it, but can’t do all those different missions,” he said. Instead, the autonomous ship would complement the manned fleet.

Balancing Art and Science

As for the ongoing development of the prototype, Blue Water has found that “there’s definitely an art and a science to it. You want to make it elegant and the last thing you want to do is make a ship look like a science project.  And then there’s the science in terms of all the engineering that goes into it.”

Blue Water Autonomy has raised $50 million in Series A funding led by GV, as announced late last month, bringing its total funding to $64 million. It plans to announce its shipyard (where the prototype will be built) later this year.  Traditional ship building programs last anywhere from three to five years, but Hamilton told Webster that his firm would launch a ship within a year and a half.

Hamilton noted the urgency, particularly as nations embrace drone warfare. Autonomous ships have a place in the Navy’s arsenal, and as Hamilton put it, “we don’t want to have our military be behind a generation in terms of technology…it’s about making sure our military leaders and our policy makers have the best tools that are available so they can make those [combat] decisions.”

PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster is one of the world’s leading experts in payments innovation and the digital economy, advising multinational companies and sitting on boards of emerging AI, healthtech, and real-time payments firms. She founded PYMNTS.com in 2009, a top media platform covering innovation in payments, commerce, and the digital economy. Webster is also the author of the NEXT newsletter and a co-founder of Market Platform Dynamics, specializing in driving and monetizing innovation across industries.

Rylan Hamilton is a veteran of the U.S. Navy and is the CEO and co-founder of Blue Water Autonomy.  As an early leader at Amazon Robotics, he deployed thousands of industrial robots to warehouses around the country. He also founded 6 River Systems, a warehouse automation company that was eventually bought by Shopify.