Mentioned:Anduril IndustriesPopoto Modem
Anduril Industries acquired underwater acoustics company Popoto Modem to solve subsea communications challenges across its growing fleet of autonomous underwater vehicles. The companies have worked together for several years, already integrating Popoto's adaptive acoustic modems into Anduril's Copperhead UUVs and other maritime platforms.
What's happening
- Anduril folded Popoto Modem, a Sandwich, Massachusetts acoustic communications company, into its maritime systems portfolio following years of integration work.
- Popoto's adaptive acoustic modems are already deployed on Copperhead UUVs and feed into Ghost Shark, the autonomous submarine co-developed with Australia now on a $1.7 billion program of record.
- Popoto will continue serving existing customers while leveraging Anduril's production capacity to scale high-rate manufacturing of acoustic modems.
Why it matters
- Acoustic communications remain the only viable subsea link for autonomous systems, but suffer from low bandwidth, unreliability and environmental distortion that threaten operational coordination across dispersed platforms.
- Popoto's forward error correction and Doppler compensation technology reduces transmission failures in challenging ocean conditions, critical for port security and harbor defense operations where multiple sensors must communicate reliably.
- Consolidating modem capability inside Anduril eliminates a supply chain dependency and creates internal production capacity to scale across Copperhead, Ghost Shark, Dive XL, Seabed Sentry and future unmanned systems.
Going deeper
- Anduril has made 5 major moves in maritime since 2022: Dive Technologies acquisition (2022), Copperhead family introduction (2025), Seabed Sentry sensing network (2025), Ghost Shark co-development with Australia, and team-up with HD Hyundai for autonomous surface vessels supporting US Navy MUSV effort.
- Popoto's modem automatically adapts data transmission speed versus reliability based on ocean conditions, deliberately sending redundant coded bits so receivers can reconstruct messages even when acoustic signals degrade from temperature, salinity, depth, waves and noise.
- The Navy already contracted Anduril to prototype Dive vehicles, though one was captured by Iran during CENTCOM deployment in summer 2026.
The intrigue
- Anduril's strategy to mesh multiple subsea sensors and systems through Popoto's communications layer suggests the company is building toward an integrated underwater network for port and harbor defense, raising questions about which customer will deploy this integrated capability first.
Source: tectonicdefense.com · Oct 2, 2026 · Drafted with Claude, reviewed by Industrial Base Alpha.