Seed funding fuels production of autonomous vessels that sustain distributed forces across the Indo-Pacific — built where they’ll be used.

Bulwark Dynamics, a developer of autonomous landing craft, announced $6.8 million in seed funding from investors including SBI US Gateway Fund LP, Archetype Ventures, Nēnē Ventures, and Onomichi Dockyard. Proceeds will fund development and production of the company’s Caravel series, the stand-up of manufacturing capacity, and testing in operationally representative environments.

The company also announced it has signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Onomichi Dockyard (Kobe, Japan) establishing a partnership for serial production of the Caravel series.

Sustainment is the binding constraint in any Pacific fight. Distributed forces cannot be resupplied through a small number of large, crewed vessels and fixed ports that an adversary can find and strike. Caravel is an unmanned surface vessel (USV) built to resupply expeditionary units over unimproved shorelines — no port, pier, or crane required. It transits, lands on the beach, discharges its cargo, and retracts fully autonomously, including in GPS-denied environments. Caravel is not a retrofit of an existing hull or a bolt-on autonomy kit; it was purpose-built for this mission, and for production at a cost that allows it to be fielded in numbers.

“In a contested environment, the attributes that make a logistics platform efficient are the same ones that make it a target: large, crewed, concentrated, and tied to a handful of fixed nodes. Sustainment has to survive to matter. Caravel takes people off the most exposed leg of the run and spreads the delivery across many low-cost hulls, so losing one is a bad day rather than the end of the resupply.”

— Nhat Lieu, Co-founder and CEO, Bulwark Dynamics

In early 2026, the company demonstrated the full mission sequence with a Caravel 15 prototype: unmanned transit, beaching, cargo offload, and retraction off the beach, with no human intervention at any point.

Alongside the 15-foot variant, the company is developing 35-foot and 55-foot variants sized to carry one and two twenty-foot equivalent units (TEU) of containerized cargo, respectively, sharing a common set of major components — a design choice made for producibility at scale. The company’s focus is sustainment for U.S. and allied forces operating across the Indo-Pacific littorals. The same capability carries to civil use, including disaster relief, wherever cargo has to reach a shoreline without a port.

Partnership with Onomichi Dockyard

Founded in 1943, Onomichi Dockyard is one of Japan’s leading shipbuilders, with a build record spanning bulk carriers, tankers, RO/RO vessels, and ferries. The group operates two slipways across western Japan and includes Saiki Heavy Industries, a shipbuilder specializing primarily in bulk carriers. The group delivers approximately 350,000 gross tons annually.

Under the partnership, Bulwark and Onomichi will work together to build the Caravel series in Japan. In addition to using the existing Onomichi shipyard, the two companies are in discussions on establishing a site dedicated to serial production of unmanned vessels.

The partnership is consistent with the priority the White House has placed on working with allied shipbuilders to rebuild U.S. maritime industrial capacity — set out in America’s Maritime Action Plan in February 2026 and carried forward in subsequent executive action this year.

“Building unmanned systems at scale inside the theater, on the industrial base and supply chains an ally already has, does two things at once. It solves a problem the people running these missions have today, and it puts decades of allied know-how to work on American reindustrialization.”

— Nhat Lieu, Co-founder and CEO, Bulwark Dynamics

What’s Next

With this funding, Bulwark Dynamics will accelerate the cycle of developing and validating production vessels and feeding back operational lessons, while working with Onomichi Dockyard to build the production capacity to field Caravel in numbers. The company is also expanding hiring across engineering, test operations, and business development at both its U.S. and Japan locations.