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FounderBlue Water AutonomyAmerican

Austin Gray

Co-Founder & Chief Strategy Officer

About

Austin Gray is co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Blue Water Autonomy, where he shapes partnerships and ensures mission alignment with the US Navy and key defense stakeholders. He began his career as a US Navy intelligence officer, deploying on aircraft carriers across the Middle East and the South China Sea, before pursuing graduate studies at MIT and Harvard. While in Boston he co-founded and helped run the MIT-Harvard Defense Tech Initiative, helping seed the city's defense tech ecosystem. The day after graduating from Harvard Business School, he flew to Ukraine and embedded in a drone factory and with the Kyiv Engineering Corps, building supply chains and collecting front-line feedback for unmanned systems still used in combat today. He brings that wartime urgency and customer empathy to building autonomous warships for democracy's navies.

Previous roles

  • Co-Founder, MIT-Harvard Defense Tech Initiative
  • Defense tech volunteer / advisor, Kyiv Engineering Corps (Ukraine)
  • Naval Intelligence Officer, US Navy

Notable work

  • Blue Water Autonomy
  • Naval intelligence
  • Defense strategy
  • Unmanned systems
  • Drone supply chains
  • Defense tech ecosystems

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