Blue Water Autonomy partners with Tulip and Caterpillar to modernize shipbuilding. BOSTON, May 7, 2026 /PRNewswire/ - Blue Water Autonomy, a Boston-based technology and shipbuilding company, today announced strategic partnerships to scale the production of its next-generation, autonomous vessels, combining proven industrial capacity with AI-native, software-enabled manufacturing capability. The announcement builds on the company's recent introduction of its Liberty Class, a 190-foot autonomous ship designed for the U.S. Navy, currently under construction at Conrad Shipyard. It comes as the Navy and broader defense ecosystem accelerate toward producible, autonomous ships, in support of the Navy's Medium Unmanned Surface Vessels program, the fleet's largest unmanned initiative with more than $6 billion of funding. "Traditional shipbuilding doesn't scale, and pure software approaches don't deliver hardware," said Rylan Hamilton, CEO of Blue Water Autonomy. "We're doing both. Integrating proven marine systems with AI-driven manufacturing and operations to fundamentally rethink how ships are built. By distributing and parallelizing work across proven partners, we're creating a production system that can move at the pace required for a modern maritime industrial base." At the core of Blue Water's model is a network of best-in-class partners across critical shipbuilding components and manufacturing infrastructure: "Shipbuilding has always required extraordinary coordination, and we're giving that coordination a software backbone," said Erik Mirandette, Chief Business Officer at Tulip. "Tulip connects every step on the factory floor with real-time data and AI-native tools, so Blue Water can orchestrate production at scale, catch issues earlier, and build with the speed and reliability that modern maritime demands." Together, these partners enable Blue Water to digitize and orchestrate shipbuilding from the ground up, transforming traditionally manual, fragmented processes into a scalable, software-defined production system. The result: speed, flexibility, and resilience. The announcement builds on Blue Water's broader strategy to modernize maritime manufacturing by pairing established industrial capabilities with next-generation software infrastructure, enabling faster iteration, improved reliability, and increased production capacity across a network of partners. Shipbuilding and testing of Blue Water's vessels are already underway, with the company currently executing an accelerated testing program and targeting a live autonomy demonstration later this summer. About Blue Water Autonomy. Founded in 2024, Blue Water Autonomy is making unmanned ships a reality. Blue Water Autonomy's autonomous ship design fully integrates hardware, software, and AI, allowing vessels to operate on the open ocean for months at a time. For more information, visit www.blw.ai. Tulip, the leader in frontline operations, is helping companies of all sizes and industries equip their workforces with connected, composable, and intelligent tools. With Tulip's AI-native, no-code platform, manufacturers can digitize processes, collect real-time data, and drive continuous improvement - by using AI and without writing a line of code. Tulip is headquartered in Somerville, MA, with offices in Munich, Budapest, Singapore, Tel Aviv, and Tokyo. About Caterpillar. For more than a century, Caterpillar has built a better, more sustainable world. With 2025 sales and revenues of $67.6 billion, Caterpillar Inc. is shaping the future as the world's leading manufacturer of construction and mining equipment, off-highway diesel and natural gas engines, industrial gas turbines and diesel-electric locomotives. Backed by one of the largest independent global dealer networks and financing services through Cat Financial, the company's primary business segments: Power & Energy, Construction Industries and Resource Industries are solving customers' toughest challenges through commercial excellence and advanced technology, driven by a highly skilled, dedicated global team. Learn more at www.caterpillar.com. About precise Power Systems. Precise Power Systems (PPS), based in Howell, Michigan, is a specialized engineering and manufacturing company focused on designing and delivering containerized and skid-mounted power and auxiliary system solutions for defense and maritime applications. With deep experience in supporting U.S. Navy programs and unmanned surface vessels, PPS integrates generator modules, automated fuel and lube oil systems, and acoustic enclosures into fully tested, turnkey packages built for reliability, rapid installation, and long-term maintainability. Leveraging in-house engineering, fabrication, controls integration, and test capabilities, PPS provides customers with highly integrated, mission-ready systems that reduce shipyard complexity and support scalable production. Learn more at www.precisepowersystems.com. Valstad builds robotic fabrication cells for distributed shipbuilding. Headquartered in Austin, Texas, the company designs and operates automated assembly systems that scale vessel structure production for U.S. naval and commercial programs. Valstad's cells are designed to be qualified in-house and deployed to partner yards, giving shipbuilders proven manufacturing capability without first-of-kind integration risk. Learn more at valstad.com. 21 %. Press Published by 3rd Party PR Representative on: June 30, 2026

Oh, DAWG: Defense Autonomous Warfare Group. Posted By: Spartan X May 7, 2026 From $225 million in fiscal year 2026 to $54.6 BILLION in fiscal 2027: a 24,300 percent increase! The "agentic AI infrastructure that enables battle management and kill chain execution at machine speed" is being developed at scale with drone systems from planes, to ships, to land vehicles. Hegseth's AI push is part of a broader "maximum lethality" doctrine that frames the Pentagon's sole mission as killing enemies. ⁃ Patrick Wood, Editor. On April 3, 2026, the White House released a fiscal year 2027 defense budget request of $1.5 trillion - the largest proposed defense spending plan in American history, representing a 44 percent increase over the FY2026 appropriation. Buried inside that top-line figure, but unmistakable to anyone tracking the trajectory of defense technology investment, is a single number: $54.6 billion requested for the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group. The DAWG received $225 million in FY2026, the year of its establishment. The FY2027 proposal represents a 243-fold year-over-year increase. By any historical standard, that is not incremental scaling. It is a structural commitment - the kind of budget signal that reorganizes industrial priorities, reshapes acquisition timelines, and redefines what it means to be a relevant defense technology company for the next decade. The DAWG was established quietly within the Pentagon in late 2025 with a mandate that deliberately distinguishes it from the Replicator initiative it partly grew out of. Where Replicator and the Drone Dominance program focus on Group 1 first-person-view drones and small attritable systems, the DAWG's scope extends to larger one-way attack platforms, small unmanned surface vessels, and the agentic AI infrastructure that enables battle management and kill chain execution at machine speed. The institutional logic is clear: Replicator demonstrated that the United States could field low-cost autonomous systems at volume; the DAWG is designed to ensure that capability becomes a permanent feature of the joint force rather than a time-limited program of record. The $54.6 billion request is the budget mechanism for that permanence. What 200,000 systems demands from the industrial base. The Drone Dominance program, running in parallel with the DAWG's larger-platform mandate, has set a procurement target of more than 200,000 autonomous systems by 2027. Phase I vendors were identified in February 2026, and the program's four-phase acquisition structure carries a cumulative budget signal of approximately $1.1 billion - a figure that, while significant, understates the downstream industrial demand generated by fielding autonomous systems at this scale. The sustainment, software update, and logistics tail of 200,000 platforms is a larger and longer-duration program than the initial procurement contract. Companies entering the Drone Dominance pipeline are not signing a single contract; they are positioning for multi-year production relationships in a market the FY2027 budget has now confirmed is permanent. The production infrastructure requirements are substantial. Saronic Technologies, which closed a $1.75 billion Series D in March 2026 and reached a $9.25 billion valuation, is building Port Alpha - a next-generation autonomous surface vessel shipyard in Texas - as a direct response to Navy demand signals. Blue Water Autonomy broke ground on its Liberty-class 190-foot autonomous surface vessel at Conrad Shipyard in Louisiana the same month. HII and Shield AI completed the first integrated autonomy test aboard the ROMULUS USV in early 2026. The capital formation and facility investment occurring across the autonomous maritime sector in the first quarter of 2026 reflects a market reading the DAWG budget signal accurately: the industrial base needs to be built now, at scale, to meet a procurement curve that starts steep and stays elevated. The software and compliance layer that determines who participates. Hardware capacity is necessary but not sufficient. The DAWG's acquisition model, consistent with the January 2026 DoD AI Strategy and its data sharing mandates, requires that platforms entering the autonomous warfare ecosystem comply with Modular Open Systems Architecture standards and expose standardized interfaces for mission tasking, telemetry, and payload integration under the Open Mission Systems and Universal Command and Control Interface frameworks. These are not optional certifications for vendors willing to accept a compliance premium. They are entry requirements. A platform that cannot be managed through the joint C2 infrastructure, cannot receive over-the-air mission updates through a standardized API, or cannot expose its autonomy stack for third-party integration is not eligible for the DAWG procurement pipeline regardless of its performance in isolated testing. The software supply chain requirements compound the open architecture mandate. CMMC Level 2 and Level 3 certifications apply to the full stack - not just administrative IT systems but the embedded firmware, autonomy models, and sensor fusion software resident on each platform. The Zero Trust Strategy 2.0 requirement to extend identity verification and continuous authentication to operational technology means that autonomous platforms operating within DAWG-governed missions must be enrolled in the same identity and access management architecture as the command and control nodes directing them. For defense technology companies that built platforms assuming a permissive software environment, this compliance posture is a non-trivial engineering and governance undertaking. For companies that designed open, auditable, MOSA-compliant architectures from the outset, it is the competitive differentiator the market is now willing to reward at scale. The generational context. The $54.6 billion DAWG request, set against the $1.5 trillion total FY2027 defense budget, represents a defense investment trajectory that has no modern precedent outside the Cold War nuclear build-up. The difference is that the Cold War build-out concentrated capability in a small number of exquisite, expensive platforms. The autonomous warfare build-out is explicitly designed to distribute capability across thousands of low-cost, attritable systems operating under AI-enabled coordination - a fundamentally different industrial model that advantages agile manufacturing, software-defined platforms, and edge AI architectures over prime contractor systems integration. The defense technology companies positioned to capture the DAWG-driven demand are those that can produce at volume, update software at commercial speed, and demonstrate edge autonomy that survives the contested electromagnetic environment the Swarm Forge Crucible is designed to replicate. The budget has been proposed. The timeline is set. The build-out of America's machine force is now a line item.

Blue Water Autonomy, a Boston-based shipbuilding company, has announced strategic partnerships to scale production of its autonomous vessels using a distributed, AI-enabled manufacturing model. The company is partnering with Tulip, Caterpillar, Precise Power Systems and Valstad to build its Liberty Class, a 190-foot autonomous ship for the US Navy's Medium Unmanned Surface Vessels programme. Founded in 2024, Blue Water is combining traditional industrial capacity with software-driven manufacturing to address scalability challenges in shipbuilding. Tulip provides AI-native factory floor coordination tools, whilst Valstad supplies robotic fabrication cells and Caterpillar and Precise Power Systems handle propulsion and power systems. The first vessel is under construction at Conrad Shipyard, with live autonomy demonstrations planned for summer 2026. The Navy's programme has over $6 billion in funding.