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 connected.

“I can take any boat the military has and make it into an autonomous boat,” says Lwin. “We’ve abstracted away specific motors and specific actuators. We built everything in modules. If you give me a random motor, it would probably take us two weeks to figure out how to connect to that.”

Havoc’s approach would seem to put it in competition with other tech-first defense companies, including the towering Anduril, which is reportedly raising at a $60 billion valuation. The bullish case for Havoc isn’t that it could replace Anduril’s Lattice—a platform that connects the military’s disparate systems and data streams, compiling everything into a central operating picture that’s enhanced by AI analysis—which is already embedded in hundreds of systems across the U.S. military. Rather, Havoc will succeed if it can prove itself to be the best at its narrow focus of commanding autonomous drones. Its software could then be integrated as a layer within and around other systems, including Lattice.

Havoc hasn’t sold its software to the U.S. military as a standalone product yet. But it has delivered 32 drone boats—some leased, others sold. The 1st Cavalry Division of the Army, which actually has more boats than the Navy, is currently training with Havoc vessels. Soldiers’ comments about Havoc have so far been positive, says a senior Army official, and because their feedback helps determine which products are chosen for future contracts, Havoc nabbing such deals is a “high possibility.”

“It’s just a very easy platform to use,” the official explains. “That is key, because we have all this technology out there. There are so many unique systems. Even our legacy systems are so complicated. We need a soldier to be able to pick it up like an iPhone.” As for Anduril’s Lattice: “It is a little more complicated.”

The drone boat race is still in its earliest stages. No autonomous surface vessels are known to have been used in combat yet, though remote-controlled boats are being deployed in Ukraine. Havoc has over 20,000 hours of testing, but only so much can be proven in simulations. (Havoc’s biggest trials so far used 25 boats at once; Saronic’s had over 30; and Anduril’s over 50. Havoc hopes to test 50 at a time this summer.)

Nevertheless, the hype in the space is as hot as the competition. Investment in defense tech was already surging over the past few years, driven by the Ukraine War, the Pentagon’s growing appetite for commercial technologies and swelling military budgets. Then the war in Iran laid bare the gaps in the U.S.’ naval capabilities. Since the conflict began, the median funding round for American aerospace defense companies has been $20 million, according to PitchBook, compared to $5 million over the 12 months before the war. Drone boats are considered highly desirable because they are uncrewed—keeping American soldiers out of harm’s way—and generally designed to conduct diverse missions like mine removal, surveillance, escort services and combat, all of which could theoretically be relevant to the Strait of Hormuz standoff. Havoc says it has 55 boats it could send to the strait now.

“For the entire sector of new entrants to the drone manufacturing industry, this is really good for their financial models,” says Rockford Weitz, a maritime studies professor at Tufts’ Fletcher School. “What this shows is great validation of their business case—that many aspects of the future of naval warfare involve sophisticated autonomous systems.” Adds Brad Harrison of Scout Ventures, Havoc’s largest non-founder shareholder: “The Strait of Hormuz challenge is good long-term for Havoc, because it will be able to provide technology to help create safe shipping lanes. And I think more than ever, that’s going to be a huge priority globally.”

Lwin says several Gulf countries have sent him inquiries since the conflict began. There are also ripe opportunities in other geopolitical hotspots, from the ongoing war in Ukraine to the looming threat of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan.

For Lwin, the latter threat is extra personal. He grew up in Burma in the late 1980s, when the country was in the midst of a violent crackdown following uprisings against its military regime, and fled to the United States with his family at age 10. The fact that China supported and sold weapons to the Burmese government—while the United States backed the country’s pro-democracy movements—made a lasting impression on him. “China is the reason Burma is so bad,” he says. “I know who the enemy is.”

The Chinese government placed sanctions on Havoc in December 2024 and April 2025; Lwin believes it’s because he spoke publicly about trying to bolster Taiwan’s defenses. (The U.S. military used some Havoc vessels a few weeks ago during Balikatan, an annual exercise with allied powers in the Philippines that acts as a show of strength in China’s backyard.) Lwin wants Havoc to play a major part in deterring Beijing’s expansion in the South China Sea.

“It affects the U.S., but also think about Vietnam, Cambodia, all those countries on the periphery. They are reaching out to us for help—specifically Havoc. We have relationships with them,” he says. Returning to his childhood, he adds: “Yeah, I think that’s what drives it. I have seen firsthand what the other side wants to do.”

The U.S. embassy in Burma helped sneak Lwin out of the country in 1995; he, his mother and two siblings left to join his father, who had escaped five years earlier. The first American Lwin ever saw was an embassy Marine, a fact that helped inspire his eventual decision to join the U.S. military. “As a kid, that just sticks with you,” he says. Lwin became an American citizen in 2000.

His family scraped by once they settled in California, his father working as a truck driver and his mother as a nursing assistant. Lwin found an unorthodox way to earn some extra cash: When he was a junior in high school, the rise of NetZero inspired him and his brother to start a resale internet service called “Freest,” providing free dial-up access with paid advertising. Half a year in, they were making $4,000 to $5,000 per month with over 100 customers and wanted to scale further. So the brothers pitched a bank for funding. “They were very interested,” says Lwin, laughing. “Then at some point they realized I was a high schooler.”

Lwin got an undergraduate degree at the Naval Academy, where his then-teacher Andrew Roy—now a Havoc executive—says he was a “great” student with an “engineering mind” who nevertheless could not tuck in his shirt or clean his room. Lwin left to spend 11 years in the Navy (including two in the Persian Gulf), became a flight officer and won three air medals for combat.

His wife introduced him to his Havoc cofounder and chief operating officer Joe Turner; the two met when they were toddlers in Connecticut and grew up together, though Turner also spent much of his childhood moving around the world for his dad’s job in the oilfield services industry. Like Lwin, he’s a Navy vet with a longtime entrepreneurial streak. In 2016, he and his dad started an underwater vehicle company, Exocetus, which closed in 2023 but taught him lessons he’s taken to Havoc.

“We moved slow,” says Turner. “We focused on building this really bespoke, perfect vehicle and didn’t focus on software, didn’t focus on market development. We were trying to build a perfect thing that we didn’t even know the market wanted.”

At Havoc, it’s been market-first from the beginning. In late 2023, Lwin and Turner were respectively holding senior and consulting roles at the electric seaglider maker REGENT when they heard then-Under Secretary of Defense Heidi Shyu speak at a conference. Shyu described the Pentagon’s “Hellscape” plan to send a flood of drones into the Taiwan Strait in the event of a Chinese invasion. She told the room she needed companies that could both build those boats and program them to work together as a swarm.

“Joe and I were like, ‘Let’s do it,’” remembers Lwin. As it happened, they had already been experimenting with drone boats in their spare time. Inspired by how the war in Ukraine showed that “you could take commercial products and make anything into a complex robot,” they’d been spending their weekends in Lwin’s garage fashioning drones out of canoes and rubber boats, plus components from Amazon and other commercial sites. Lwin wrote the code in Python. They tested contraptions at Turner’s parents’ lake house.

After Shyu’s speech, they quit their jobs and started Havoc in January 2024. Though their boats have come a long way since Lwin and Turner were strapping two canoes together with planks of wood in a garage, Havoc’s eight vessel offerings are still far from flashy. Manufactured by seven shipbuilders in the U.S., they are designed to be simple, cheap and frankly, disposable.

“The boat doesn’t matter,” says Lwin. “Software is the sophisticated piece here.” The price tag is key to the appeal; Rampages go for $200,000 including the software, whereas the Navy has traditionally spent hundreds of millions or billions on its highly advanced “exquisite” ships. “Who cares if they blow up a $200,000 boat?” Lwin says. “Good! They wasted missiles!”

There’s still the risk that a bigger player like Anduril eventually renders Havoc irrelevant. That could happen if Lattice, which is already much more broadly used across the military, proves itself able to replicate Havoc’s specialties.

Most of the dozens of drone boat startups knocking at the Pentagon’s door are similarly gambling that they can capture a niche. “The bearish case [for Havoc],” says maritime tech expert Tobias Stapleton, “is that in the end, instead of needing 10 different solutions, the Navy figures out that they only need two or three solutions. Then you’ll have some attrition and shakeout in the industry.”

Havoc investor Howard Morgan, chair and general partner of B Capital, isn’t too worried about Anduril coming for Lwin’s niche: “Usually it’s easier to scale up than down in these things.” He believes Havoc’s simplicity ethos will meet the moment as the Pentagon—tired of spending on ultra-expensive and complex hardware that takes years to deliver—turns in the low-cost direction. “An admiral said to my colleague at one point, ‘We want to buy Hondas, not Bentleys,’” remembers Morgan. “‘And we want to buy a lot of them.’”

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