Saildrone, Inc.

Richard Jenkins spent years chasing a land speed record on a wind-powered craft, and the rigid wing he patented for that project became the basis of a company. Saildrone started in Alameda, California in 2012 and now runs a fleet of uncrewed surface vessels that it does not sell so much as operate. Customers buy sea time and data. The company keeps title to the vehicles, staffs the mission control room, and delivers the take through a browser tool called Mission Portal or straight into a customer system over an API. Twelve years of operations have put more than 2.5 million nautical miles and roughly 65,000 days at sea behind the fleet. Headcount sat near 250 in 2026, small for the mileage. A Copenhagen office opened in 2025 alongside a $60 million round led by Denmark's export and investment fund, and Lockheed Martin put $50 million in as a strategic investor that October, taking total funding past $345 million.

Four vehicle classes cover the range. Explorer is the original 23-foot wing-driven boat, still the workhorse for fisheries surveys, metocean measurement and the hurricane transits that first got the company on television. Voyager is a 33-foot electric-drive vessel with the wing as a secondary power source, carrying radar, AIS, a pan-tilt-zoom infrared camera, Starlink and a winched sound velocity profiler across roughly 100 days between service stops. Surveyor is the 65-foot deep-ocean mapper, built with a hull-mounted multibeam that reaches past 20,000 feet, and Austal USA has produced examples of it. Spectre, revealed in April 2026, is a different animal entirely. At 52 meters and about 250 tonnes it carries more than 70 tonnes of payload at up to 27 knots, and it splits into two variants: Silent Endurance, which uses the wing and controllable-pitch propellers for the quiet slow tow that anti-submarine warfare needs, and Stealth, which drops the wing for a low-profile strike and electronic warfare role.

The mission book runs wider than the Navy work that draws the headlines. Seafloor and coastal mapping is a commercial line in its own right, covering cable route survey, sub-bottom profiling and deep-ocean bathymetry, with about 90,000 square kilometers charted. Science customers buy ocean data on carbon, salinity, dissolved oxygen and fisheries stock, and NOAA has used Voyagers over deep-sea coral ground in the Gulf of Maine. Security work sits on the same hulls, sold as maritime domain awareness and as undersea detection for anti-submarine tasks. Fourth Fleet and Fifth Fleet have run Saildrones against drug trafficking, illegal fishing and border monitoring, a Navy task order extension in 2026 funded roughly twenty Voyagers in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific into 2027, a separate task order put Surveyors on Atlantic bottom mapping for the Naval Oceanographic Office, and a Surveyor sailed from Pearl Harbor into RIMPAC 2026. Kinetics and effectors are now listed as a capability. That is the newest part of the business and the reason Spectre exists.