Saronic's first autonomous ship required roughly 50,000 labor hours to build, versus 7 to 9 million labor hours for a traditional destroyer, showing the scale of efficiency autonomy unlocks.
Dino Mavrookas cites a stark labor-hour comparison between Saronic's autonomous vessel (Marada) and a traditional Navy destroyer to illustrate the magnitude of savings autonomy-driven redesign enables. ✦ AI generated
Dino Mavrookas · a16z Podcast · 2026-05-19 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 2:10
Marada's using is about a 50,000 labor hour on our first ship. Just for order of magnitude, put it in frame of reference. Apples and oranges comparison here. I'm going to acknowledge that up front. But a destroyer is 7 to 9 million labor hours. So, that's the scale and speed that autonomy unlocks.
verbatim transcript · starts at 2:10
2:10just fundamentally use less steel. How do you do that? You build for software autonomy and digitization. Same thing on labor hours. We're not going to acquire a per hour labor rate cheaper than they're paying in China. So, let's build ships much faster. For example, Marada's using is about a 50,000 labor hour on our first ship. Just for order of magnitude, put it in frame of reference. Apples and oranges comparison here. I'm
2:40going to acknowledge that up front. But a destroyer is 7 to 9 million >> Wow. >> labor hours. So, that's the scale and speed that autonomy unlocks because you can redesign the whole platform and make it much simpler to build. And then you build the Then you have the capability at the scale that you need to keep as many people as possible out of combat scenarios. >> You
3:06You mentioned the sort of factories and bringing bringing autonomy into the actual manufacturing processes. You've put real money behind rebuilding the American industrial base, most notably a major expansion of your Louisiana shipyard, as well as getting prepared to launch Port Arthur where we're excited We're excited for news there at some point soon. How are you thinking about Saronic investing in some of these forgotten areas forgotten demographics
3:34as you build out manufacturing across the US? And has How is scaling been similar different complimentary for the different customer bases that you're targeting? >> I mean, the workforce is critical, right? And Circa and I were talking about the workforce earlier. We have to rebuild the workforce to support the maritime industrial base, right? You can't create people with 15 years of experience overnight. So, it goes back
4:04to the first principles approach design of the ship. Design the ship so you actually don't need 15 years of welding experience to build it in the first place. Then you can actually rebuild and retrain the workforce. Um I'll steal one of the lines from our head of manufacturing. He says, "Less like an encyclopedia, more like IKEA." It's like everybody can build furniture. If somebody can't come out of Somebody