DriX vs Saronic USV (Corsair / Mirage / Marauder) in 2026

DriX

Exail's DriX is the commercial-surface entry of the maritime cohort: an autonomous surface vessel for hydrographic survey and defense mine countermeasures, running the CortiX autonomy stack (supervised autonomous navigation and obstacle avoidance, fusing camera, infrared, LiDAR, and radar across surface and underwater). It is made by Exail, the merged ECA Group and iXblue entity (France), and is dual-use across survey and defense.

DEPLOY records it at the vehicle level (the DriX USV, not the Exail parent). It is sold to survey operators and navies on contract; there is no consumer price.

Saronic USV (Corsair / Mirage / Marauder)

Saronic Technologies (founded 2022 in Austin, Texas by Dino Mavrookas, an eleven-year Navy SEAL, with CTO Vibhav Altekar, an early Anduril engineer who worked on Ghost Shark) makes defense autonomous surface vessels and is the new-defense maritime archetype, extending the AI-first defense cohort of Anduril, Shield AI, and Helsing from the air into the surface-naval regime. Its production line is the 24-foot Corsair (1,000+ nm, 1,000 lb), the 52-foot Mirage (2,500+ nm, 3,500 lb), and the 180-foot Marauder medium uncrewed surface vessel, and it is building a 'Port Alpha' shipyard.

Its funding ladder ran from a $175M Series B at a $1B valuation (2024) to a $600M Series C at $4B (February 2025) to a $1.75 billion Series D at a $9.25 billion valuation on March 31, 2026, led by Kleiner Perkins. DEPLOY records it at early commercial maturity on one real production-intent Navy contract with money obligated.

A precise cap-flag on that contract: the often-cited $392 million figure is a Navy other-transaction-authority ceiling through 2031 with about $197 million obligated in July 2025, and the Navy did not name a vessel. As defense procurement, there is no consumer price.