Blue Water Autonomy
Boston shipbuilder developing the Liberty Class, a 190-ft crewless steel ship for the US Navy; $64M from GV and Eclipse; first hull building at Conrad Shipyard.
Background
Blue Water Autonomy was founded in Boston in 2024 by three veterans of the Navy and the Boston robotics cluster. Rylan Hamilton, CEO, served as a Navy engineering and surface warfare officer, led early deployments at Amazon Robotics, and co-founded warehouse-automation firm 6 River Systems, which Shopify bought for $450 million. Scott Miller, CTO, was an early iRobot engineer and later its VP of engineering through the Roomba scale-up and IPO, then founded Dragon Innovation, acquired by Avnet.
Austin Gray, CSO, is a former Navy intelligence officer who volunteered in a Ukrainian drone factory after finishing MIT and Harvard degrees. The company left stealth in April 2025, already salt-water testing a roughly 100-ton vessel outside Boston. Its first product, the Liberty Class unveiled in February 2026, is a 190-foot steel autonomous ship built on Damen's Stan Patrol 6009 Axe Bow hull, its engine room and electrical systems re-architected for months-long crewless operation — over 10,000 nautical miles of range and more than 150 metric tons of payload.