Bulwark Dynamics has raised $6.8 million in seed funding to develop and manufacture autonomous landing craft designed to resupply U.S. and allied forces in contested environments. Investors include SBI US Gateway Fund LP, Archetype Ventures, Nēnē Ventures and Onomichi Dockyard. The proceeds will support development and production of Bulwark’s Caravel series, manufacturing capacity and testing in operationally representative environments.
Bulwark also signed a memorandum of understanding with Onomichi Dockyard in Japan to establish a partnership for serial production of the Caravel family.
Caravel is an autonomous unmanned surface vessel designed to move supplies to expeditionary units across unimproved shorelines without requiring a port, pier or crane.
The vessel can autonomously travel to shore, land on a beach, unload cargo and retract back into the water. Bulwark said the system is also designed to operate in GPS-denied environments.
Rather than retrofitting autonomy onto an existing vessel, Bulwark designed Caravel specifically around autonomous military logistics and scalable production.
In early 2026, the company demonstrated the complete mission sequence using its 15-foot Caravel 15 prototype, completing unmanned transit, beaching, cargo unloading and retraction without human intervention.
Bulwark is also developing 35-foot and 55-foot versions capable of transporting one and two twenty-foot equivalent units of containerized cargo, respectively.
The variants share major components to simplify manufacturing and support production at greater scale. Although the primary focus is military sustainment across the Indo-Pacific, the technology could also be applied to disaster relief and other situations where cargo must reach shorelines without ports.
Onomichi Dockyard was founded in 1943 and operates two slipways in western Japan. The shipbuilder and its group produce approximately 350,000 gross tons annually.
Bulwark and Onomichi plan to manufacture Caravel vessels in Japan using existing shipyard infrastructure and are discussing the creation of a dedicated site for serial production of unmanned vessels.
Bulwark will use the funding to continue developing and validating production vessels while expanding hiring across engineering, test operations and business development in the U.S. and Japan.
The company was founded in 2025 and is headquartered in Menlo Park, California, with additional operations in Tokyo.
KEY QUOTES:
“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 of Bulwark Dynamics
“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 of Bulwark Dynamics
