ROBBRIEF
Blue Water is one of six companies competing for task orders under a $40 million IDIQ (a federal task order pool) with NAVOCEANO, the Naval Oceanographic Office, to run months long seabed surveys in the Indian and Pacific oceans.
A 190-foot steel ship with no bridge crew is now on the U.S. Navy's list to spend months mapping the seafloor across the Indian and Pacific oceans. Blue Water Autonomy, a Boston startup founded in 2024, is one of six companies selected for a multiple-award IDIQ contract with the Naval Oceanographic Office (NAVOCEANO) for high-resolution ocean-floor mapping with long-endurance uncrewed surface vessels.
The $40 million is a ceiling, not a prize. The contract is an IDIQ, a pool of money the Navy draws from via task orders; Blue Water will compete with AOR International, Chance Technologies, Link Technologies, Ocean Power Technologies, and Saildrone for the work over a two-year base period running August 2026 through July 2028.
The bar for earning those task orders is set by the solicitation's technical requirements: 25 days of continuous deep-ocean survey, multibeam sonar from 200 meters to full-ocean depth, 2,000 linear nautical miles of compliant data per month, and delivery over the Navy's unclassified network with end-to-end encryption.
Blue Water's bid is its Liberty Class ship, built on a Damen Stan Patrol 6009 hull with 10,000+ nautical miles of range and 150+ metric tons of payload. Backed by a $50 million Series A led by GV ($64 million total), the startup is now at the same table as Saildrone and more established uncrewed-vessel vendors. The company's first Navy hull is expected to complete this year under a program of record, the formal acquisition line that separates a real platform from a demonstration.
CEO Rylan Hamilton called the award validation of the platform's long-endurance, multi-mission design. The contract window will now run that claim against the data.