Transcription
For you also, this must be good news, the Carlisle story. Right? Obviously, your funding round is very has been very successful. What are you gonna deploy that capital to do? How will you rebuild the industrial base?
Yeah. Hi, Matt, and and thanks for having me on the show. This is very exciting news for Ceramic, and as you mentioned, very exciting news for the industrial base. Before I jump into what's next for Ceramic and what we're gonna be doing, it's important to acknowledge that this fundraising really came off the back of or is a byproduct of the execution of our team over the last twelve months. Like, just twelve months ago, we raised a $600,000,000 financing round on a $4,000,000,000 valuation. That let us open our first shipyard, launch Marauder, which is a 180 foot autonomous ship, start a $300,000,000 infrastructure project into scaling production capacity at this at that shipyard, and also scale the production of our small USB products, Corsair, which you see right behind me, well into the thousands.
Now as we look forward, what are we going to do with this new capital? We're gonna continue to accelerate the production and the delivery of our vessels to The US and allies around the world. We're gonna launch new products, new ships, and we're gonna continue that investment into the shipbuilding industrial base, invest billions of dollars, create thousands of jobs in the process, and unlock production rates in shipbuilding that we haven't seen in this country since World War two and do it in a very software first, technological first approach.
And it's also I mean, I wasn't aware until we started reporting on the potential to, lift the Jones Act. What a bad state US shipbuilding is in. I mean, we only have, like, six or seven navy shipyards, and most of them are here on the East Coast. I think one in California. How how are you playing a role in in bringing back US shipbuilding, Dino?
The you're exactly right. The shipbuilding industry is in crisis right now, and you and you're seeing this as a priority of the administration. I mean, the White House just put out a maritime action plan to rebuild the maritime industrial base, and that's exactly what Saranac is investing in. When you look at the shipbuilding capacity in this country right now from a commercial perspective, The United States has 0.1% of global shipbuilding capacity. The Chinese can outbuild The United States 230 to one. And then on the military and defense side, you know, traditional naval destroyers, for example, cost billions of dollars, but also say take six to eight years to produce one of them. So how we're looking at deploying our unmanned systems is really around scale. How do we adopt very, very fast in really large quantities at a fraction of the price point that traditional manned platforms are able to be delivered to the military today?
What are the biggest benefits of these drone boats? I mean, I look at this administration seemingly begging our allies to come help out in the Strait Of Hormuz with with with with minesweepers because we have only some wooden hauled boats out there. Right? And, obviously, with a crew that you don't wanna risk with such a dangerous task, is this where you can play a critical role?
That that's exactly right. I mean, when you look at what's happening in the Straits Of Hormuz and, candidly, other maritime environments around the world, what you're seeing are increasingly con contested and increasingly complex environments. What unmanned systems really bring to the table is scale, persistence, and risk reduction. And what I mean by that is you can really deploy high numbers of these platforms, again, at a fraction of the price point of traditional manned platforms. You can operate them continuously in these dangerous environments while keeping sailors out of harm's way that really give naval commanders optionality to combat some of these threats that they're seeing that aren't, that aren't countered very easily with manned platforms alone.
What is do you know? You know, we hear so much about the defense industrial base and how, we're not building enough here. We're not building fast enough here, or efficiently enough. What is the main bottleneck to producing at scale for you?
For us, we really rethink the problem from the ground up. It's really how do you redesign the ship so that it's designed for manufacturability. We've taken a vertically integrated approach so that we can ensure that we get to the scale that this country needs. And, again, that all starts with the design. Once you have the design in place, then the workforce, the training, everything else needed to build out capacity, and then the software and the autonomy that's required to power these vessels at the scale that we're building them out. This is true maritime autonomy that is vertically integrated and delivered as a cohesive capability to the end user. That's what's required. That's what's needed. That's what we're building at Ceramic.