Undersea drone startup fetches $16M to aid hiring, manufacturing push

Vatn Systems, a one-year-old startup that makes autonomous underwater vehicles, has fetched $13 million in capital through a seed round that included participation from three of the market’s most notable contractors.

This shortlist of them announced Tuesday should get the point across: Lockheed Martin Ventures, RTX Ventures and SAIC Ventures. The intelligence community’s venture capital arm In-Q-Tel also was involved in the round, which is intended to help Vatn through the next phase of its strategy.

DYNE Ventures led the round that included other participants such as Cubit Capital, Fortitude Ventures and Propeller Ventures. The list of returning investors includes Blue Collective, Centre Street Partners, Decisive Point and The Veteran Fund.

Founded in April 2023, Vatn describes itself as actively testing out its technologies with defense organizations such as the Navy and Marine Corps.

Vatn launched its first drones in the water within six months of the company’s start and has raised $16 million from investors since inception.

Unmanned systems are a priority for the Navy amid its push to expand the fleet and, eventually, produce sub drones that the service branch hopes will be in the hundreds of thousands one day.

It could take 15 years for the Navy to realize full-scale operations on the autonomous and unmanned front, which will also require work to set up the infrastructure that enables teaming between the crewed and uncrewed vessels.

"Vatn Systems is on a journey to redefine naval warfare by building low-cost, high-speed, autonomous underwater vehicles that can be deployed at scale as force multipliers," Vatn’s co-founder and chief executive Nelson Mills said in a release Tuesday. "This funding enables us to advance our strategy to expand our team and set up a state-of-the-art manufacturing facility to bring our autonomous underwater vehicles to market next year."

In addition to the vehicles, Vatn also designs an inertial navigation system to work at ranges of up to 1,000 miles as part of the payload delivery function. That system is also intended to work in environments where access to GPS, vision and communications tools are compromised.

The venture arms of Lockheed Martin, RTX and Science Applications International Corp. are tasked with finding and investing in technology-centric startups whose creations show potential for development and scaling into the government mission sets.

Autonomy is a key focus area for both Lockheed Martin Ventures and RTX Ventures, while data and artificial intelligence is also a common thread between all three of these organizations including SAIC Ventures.