On an overcast April day in the middle of Rhode Island’s Narragansett Bay, Paul Lwin looks like he’s playing a vintage video game. He huddles over a laptop on the deck of the spartan vessel he’s taking out on the water today. Tiny boat icons float across the screen; he draws a box around them, selects a few parameters, and clicks “Start Play.” Seconds later, a set of driverless boats in the bay a mile away begin gliding in parallel with the icons, which leave bright blue tracks on the screen in their wake. Lwin flashes an enormous grin.

Each of those autonomous crafts is a “Rampage,” the 14-foot flagship boat of Lwin’s Providence-based company, Havoc, which outfits its vessels with technology that theoretically lets a single human control thousands at once. Lwin, 40, and his cofounder Joe Turner, 42, both Navy vets, aim to become the U.S. military’s go-to maker of specialized software for not just uncrewed boats, but all domains, after recently acquiring a couple of small aerial and land drone startups as well.

“The goal here is to make sure you don’t need to know anything about robotics or autonomy,” Lwin explains, showing the steps again on the laptop. “If it’s not this simple, it’s a science experiment. Operators—especially warfighters who don’t have PhDs in robotics, who don’t have PhDs in search algorithms—will never use it if it’s more difficult than this.”

Lwin’s a seeing-is-believing zealot. As CEO, he spends much of his time doing demos for potential investors and customers, even whipping them out for members of Congress during lobbying trips, when he shows off Havoc’s vessels on a live feed. The strategy is working: Last Monday, the company closed a $100 million Series A round led by investment firms Cobalt and Boardman Bay, which more than doubled its total funding to just shy of $200 million and made it one of the top-funded contenders in the crowded drone boat category after less than two and a half years of operation.

Havoc is up against giants. The biggest name in autonomous boats is Saronic, a 3.5-year-old startup that raised $1.75 billion in March at an eye-watering $9.25 billion valuation. (Lwin won’t share Havoc’s valuation but concedes that PitchBook’s $784 million estimate is close and “just a little high.”) Yet Havoc beat Saronic in an Army innovation competition last year, xTechPacific.

The companies are targeting different slices of the market: Saronic manufactures its own vessels in the name of rebuilding the U.S. shipbuilding industrial base. Havoc doesn’t make its hulls, instead buying or commissioning ones that it outfits with its real offering, which is its software. By outsourcing, Lwin avoids “reinventing things I don’t need to reinvent”—and indeed, shipbuilding is notoriously expensive and slow. As a result, says Lwin, “We are truly the only maritime company that’s software focused.” (He says the military is still coming around to the idea of buying tech without hardware, so Havoc needs to package them together for now.)

The basis of the tech is a set of path planning and decision making algorithms that run on a GPU in a metal box sitting aboard each Havoc boat. Cameras and sensors assess the surrounding area and feed information to those models. Havoc’s vessels are meant to usually operate in swarms; they have radios and Starlink antennas that link them to the larger group in an interlocking “mesh” of local communications, such that if some go down, the rest stay........

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