Lockheed Martin Invests $50M in Saildrone, Boosting Armed USV Capabilities

Lockheed Martin announced a $50 million investment in Saildrone, a global leader in maritime autonomous systems. This strategic collaboration will deliver commercially available unmanned surface vehicles (USV) equipped with lethal, combat-proven defense technology. The companies will collaborate with a goal of delivering integrations, including on-water, live fire demonstrations, in 2026.

Why it Matters
This commercial relationship marries the world’s most sophisticated and trusted defense technology with the most capable and operationally tested USV technology. This combination will be key to realizing the U.S. Navy’s USV vision for critical missions such as fleet defense, undersea surveillance, reconnaissance, and attack. Work will begin immediately, applying an open architecture approach along with secure command and control capability to integrate Lockheed Martin’s JAGM Quad Launcher (JQL) system onto the Saildrone Surveyor platform.

Larger Saildrone vehicles are already in development to support significantly larger payloads and capabilities to include the Lockheed Martin Mk70 VLS launcher and thin line towed arrays.

Expert Perspectives
Richard Jenkins, founder and CEO, Saildrone: “For the last 10 years, we have focused on evolving the reliability, endurance and autonomy of the Saildrone platform, which has been demonstrated in over 2 million nautical miles of active customer missions. With our technology proven, de-risked and mission-ready, now is the right time to augment Saildrone USVs with sophisticated payloads to meet warfighter needs. This collaboration will give Saildrone the tools we need to transform the capabilities of our platforms, to include electronic warfare, anti-submarine warfare, sophisticated surveillance and reconnaissance, as well as deploying kinetic effects, all seamlessly integrated with Lockheed Martin’s trusted command, control and fire control systems.”

www.lockheedmartin.com