$200M drone boats for Operation Epic Fury
Jan-Erik Asplund
TL;DR: With the Strait of Hormuz effectively closed and Iran deploying suicide drone boats against commercial tankers six days into Operation Epic Fury, the scenario that Saronic and the wider autonomous naval vessel market have been building toward is unfolding in real time. Sacra estimates Saronic hit $200M in revenue in 2025, up 1,500% YoY from $12.5M in 2024. For more, check out our full report and dataset on Saronic.
We first covered Saronic in September 2025 at $12.5M in revenue as the "Anduril of the seas" building autonomous surface vessels on fixed-price contracts as the Navy gameplanned for Taiwan, then covered the broader $216B drone navy opportunity in February 2026 as Trump's reconciliation bill earmarked $5.7B for maritime autonomous systems.
Key points from our March 2026 update via Sacra AI:
- After signing ~$787M in production contracts with the Navy and becoming a core partner for the Navy’s 2026 autonomous “Golden Fleet” initiative, Sacra estimates Saronic hit $200M in revenue in 2025, up 1,500% YoY from $12.5M, reportedly raising a $1.5B Series D (Kleiner Perkins) at a ~$9B valuation for a 45x revenue multiple—compared to Anduril at $2.1B in revenue for 2025, up 110% YoY, now reportedly raising $4B at a $60B valuation for a 29x revenue multiple.
- With the Strait of Hormuz locked down since the start of Operation Epic Fury (stranding billions in oil & gas shipments) amid Iranian suicide drone boat attacks on tankers, Saronic's core thesis is being validated in real time: that securing the handful of chokepoints through which global trade flows, from the Hormuz (~10% of all trade) & Suez (~15%) to the Taiwan Strait (~21%), without putting $2.5B destroyers into harm’s way, requires large fleets of expendable, GPS-denied-capable autonomous vessels like the $400K Corsair that are producible at 2,000+ per year.
- Trump's $1.5T 2027 defense budget request, a ~50% increase over 2026 and the largest jump in the budget since the Korean War, would reverse his earlier commitment to cutting the budget & comes on top of $5.7B already committed to maritime autonomous systems in the reconciliation bill, with Saronic & Anduril well-positioned to capture the upside—though with the risk that a record-setting budget could shift appropriations power to Congress, where legacy primes with large, nationwide workforces & massive lobbying spend tend to win.
For more, check out this other research from our platform:
- Saronic (dataset)
- $216B drone navy
- $12.5M/year Anduril of the seas
- Saildrone at $43M/year growing 231% YoY
- Saildrone (dataset)
- America First vs. American Dynamism
- Anduril (dataset)
- Anduril at $1B/yr
- SpaceX (dataset)
- Anduril, SpaceX, and the American dynamism GTM playbook
- The biggest mistake defense startups make
- Ross Fubini, Managing Partner at XYZ Capital, on the defense tech opportunity
- Shield AI (dataset)
- Scott Sanders, chief growth officer at RRAI, on the defense tech startup playbook
