The Pentagon put out a call for autonomous boats. Two Navy veterans started a Rhode Island company to make them. – The Boston Globe

The next day, Lwin and Joe Turner, also a Navy veteran, quit their jobs and started Havoc – a Rhode Island-based company that does just that.

Officially formed in early 2024, Havoc, now boasts about 130 employees from New England to Hawaii, and produces not only autonomous vessels, but also the software that allows them to do “sophisticated things together,” said Lwin, Havoc’s CEO.

They may, for example, be stationed and programmed to protect a manned-military boat against enemies while traversing the ocean. Stateside, they could enhance security at cargo ports, among other uses, Lwin said.

“Even back in ’24 and now in ’26, there are a lot of people building these robots in different domains. Whether it’s maritime, air, or ground, if you think about it, they’re all robots. They just do different things,” Lwin said.

“We realized that the challenge wasn’t building those specific robots, but the challenge was making those robots work together and work with [humans] to do something useful.”

Lwin recently spoke to the Globe about Havoc’s work, its footprint in Rhode Island, and what’s next for the fast-growing company.

Q. So the idea is that you can have these boats that are equipped with your tech: You make the entire boat and then you make the software that allows the boats to communicate with each other without human input?

Lwin: Yep. We started with smaller boats, but now we’re all the way up to a 100-foot ship in Hawaii that’s running our software, and now we’ve started putting it on other things, like ground vehicles and quadcopters, and it’s the same exact software stack that’s controlling all of these.

What would be a situation the military would use this for?

There are multiple use cases. One simple use case is transferring supplies. In the Pacific, the US military is moving into these island chains … and you have to transfer supplies between them, right?

If you think about how we do that now, you would use helicopters or manned ships, which put people in danger. In a conflict with China, they’re going to probably shoot down any giant helicopters or any ships, and so you don’t want to put people at risk. So this is a way of using these vessels and these aerial platforms and even land vehicles to move supplies between and in these islands.

The other thing is what we call ISR [or intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance]. You can put thousands of these vessels in the ocean. They create a distributed sensor network. They’re all talking to each other. They can have different sensors on each boat, and then they’re all communicating and fusing that information, and giving you an ability to understand what’s going on in these big ocean areas.

Is the military and defense industry your primary business right now?

There’s some commercial use cases. We could complement harbor police. The other thing is environmental monitoring.

Right now, after a storm, especially for those [roll-on, roll-off] ships in Narragansett Bay, there are essentially fishing vessels that go out and take depth meters to make sure there’s enough draft, that the ro-ro ships aren’t going to run aground. So it’s very intensive, especially in the freezing cold. We could put those sensors on our vessels, and they could do with a human just sitting in a warm room, controlling hundreds of these vessels safely.

You have facilities all over the United States. What do you do at your locations in Boston and East Providence?

It’s a hardware site. We would not be where we are if we weren’t based in the Northeast. We needed access to the boat builders – and so Rhode Island makes the most sense – but also water space to test.

You also have the tech sector here, right? If you think about in Massachusetts, with MIT, Harvard, BU, BC, all of those colleges all have very good engineering programs. And in Rhode Island, you’ve got Brown, URI, right? In Connecticut, you have Yale, UConn. They’re producing very good engineers, and to be able to tap into that pool is what allowed us to move as quickly as possible.

Where do you want Havoc to be in the next two years?

We want to successfully have built thousands of these vessels and put them into the ocean. There’s a very compelling and relevant reason right now: If we do that, we might prevent a war in the Pacific. If the United States is able to put thousands of autonomous vessels and provide our allies with those vessels, it might just change the calculus – for China to not invade Taiwan and have this global conflict. So that is what we are focused on.

This interview has been condensed and edited for length and clarity.

The Boston Globe’s weekly Ocean State Innovators column features a Q&A with Rhode Island innovators who are starting new businesses and nonprofits, conducting groundbreaking research, and reshaping the state’s economy. Send tips and suggestions to rinews@globe.com.

Christopher Gavin can be reached at christopher.gavin@globe.com.