Bulwark Dynamics Raises $6.8M Seed for Autonomous Landing Craft
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Bulwark Dynamics, a defense technology company building autonomous landing craft, has raised $6.8 million in seed funding. The company announced the round on September 9, 2026 from Menlo Park, California, where it is headquartered; it also operates in Tokyo, Japan.
Investors in the Seed round include SBI US Gateway Fund LP, Archetype Ventures, Nēnē Ventures, and Onomichi Dockyard. The money will fund development and production of the company’s Caravel series, the stand-up of manufacturing capacity, and testing in operationally representative settings.
Alongside the funding, Bulwark signed a memorandum of understanding with Onomichi Dockyard of Kobe, Japan, to build the Caravel series in Japan. Founded in 1943, Onomichi is one of Japan’s leading shipbuilders, with a record spanning bulk carriers, tankers, RO/RO vessels, and ferries, two slipways across western Japan, and roughly 350,000 gross tons delivered annually. Its group includes Saiki Heavy Industries. Beyond using the existing yard, the two companies are discussing a site dedicated to serial production of unmanned vessels.
The problem Bulwark is chasing is sustainment in a Pacific conflict. Distributed forces cannot be resupplied through a handful of large, crewed vessels and fixed ports that an adversary can locate and strike. Caravel is an unmanned surface vessel built to resupply expeditionary units across unimproved shorelines with no port, pier, or crane. It transits, lands on the beach, unloads, and pulls back off the beach on its own, including where GPS is denied. It is not a retrofit of an existing hull or a bolt-on autonomy kit; the craft was designed for this mission and for production at a cost that allows it to be fielded in numbers. In early 2026 the company demonstrated the full sequence with a Caravel 15 prototype without any human intervention.
Along with the 15-foot version, Bulwark is developing 35-foot and 55-foot variants sized for one and two twenty-foot equivalent units of containerized cargo. All three share a common set of major components to simplify production at scale. The focus is sustainment for US and allied forces across Indo-Pacific littorals, though the same capability applies to civil logistics such as disaster relief.
Founded in the United States in 2025, Bulwark is expanding hiring across engineering, test operations, and business development at both its US and Japan locations.
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