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
- Drones Alone Are Not Enough
- Sailing Through the Spyglass: The Strategic Advantages of Blue OSINT, Ubiquitous Sensor Networks, and Deception
- Lessons from an Intelligence Officer on Ukraine's Front Line
- Blue Water Autonomy Liberty Class autonomous ship
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