"Building the State-of-the-Art in AI-Enabled Manned and Unmanned Teams"
BlackSea Technologies is a Baltimore defense company building GARC autonomous drone boats under a US Navy contract worth up to $213 million.
BlackSea Technologies is a U.S. defense technology company headquartered on the Baltimore harbor at Wagners Point, Maryland, on the site of a former WWII Liberty ship shipyard where 508 ships were built. The company was formed in 2022 when private equity firm Razor's Edge acquired Maritime Applied Physics Corporation (MAPC), a Baltimore engineering firm founded in 1986, and combined it with three additional businesses, Hard Yards, Blue Tide Marine, and Lakenheath Electronics Design, to create an integrated autonomous maritime systems manufacturer. BlackSea's core product is the GARC (Global Autonomous Reconnaissance Craft), a 16-foot aluminum unmanned surface vessel that the company manufactures at a rate of roughly 32 units per month at its Baltimore facility. Its broader product portfolio includes the Chaser and ORCA unmanned surface vessels, the Comet and NightTrain platforms, the Mainstay support system, the SPDS maritime system, and the FISHER payload system, spanning reconnaissance, strike, and logistics roles for naval customers. The company holds a U.S. Navy contract worth up to $213 million for autonomous vessel production and has expanded rapidly, growing from about 57 Baltimore employees at the time of the MAPC acquisition to approximately 235 employees by October 2025, with additional staff based in Florida, North Carolina, and California. In August 2026, a BlackSea GARC craft was used in a live Navy sinking exercise (SINKEX), demonstrating its role as an expendable loitering strike platform for surface warfare against decommissioned vessels. The company is also developing a larger 66-foot autonomous vessel and underwater drone systems to extend its product line beyond small surface craft. BlackSea markets itself around a mission of building autonomous surface and subsurface systems, along with the electronics and software that operate them, to give U.S. naval forces low-cost, mass-producible tools for contested maritime environments, drawing on Baltimore's historic shipbuilding workforce and MAPC's four decades of hands-on engineering experience for the U.S. Navy and other defense customers.
Primary type & automation activities this supplier delivers:
High-speed, low-cost, mass-produced unmanned surface vessel built for scalable naval maritime operations.
Modular high-speed USV expanding on GARC with increased payload capacity and range for ISR and logistics.
13.1m tactical USV reaching 45+ knots for AAW, MCM, ASW, EW and C-UAS missions with modular payloads.
Contact BlackSea Technologies
WEBSITE
https://www.blacksea.tech/PHONE
+1-866-286-2583HEADQUARTERS
United States
Company Facts
Founded
2022
Primary Role
Manufacturer
Company Size
employees 100-500
Primary Region
North America
Annual Sales
-
Funding Stage
-
Funding Total
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