Sam Vye started SYOS in 2021. Four years later, the company was the single-largest supplier of uncrewed surface vessels to Ukraine. By early 2026, it had a multi-domain contract with the New Zealand Defence Force, a shortlist spot on the UK Ministry of Defence's £100 million Project NYX, and 150 employees across two continents.
Now it has added a fourth domain.
The Long Tail of the Bay Dynamics Bet
The SU10 did not emerge from a lab whiteboard. In October 2025, SYOS acquired Bay Dynamics, a Tauranga-based underwater robotics shop that had spent years building inspection and construction vehicles for oil, gas, and civil engineering. The acquisition folded a decade of subsea know-how into its autonomy stack without starting from scratch.
"The SU10 extends our portfolio undersea and strengthens SYOS as a provider of affordable interoperable uncrewed capability across land, sea, air and now subsurface," Vye said at the launch.
These are products that stand alone as class-leaders, or operate as part of a connected, multi-domain uncrewed system, delivering operational effect from air to seabed, through our single autonomy stack, AAIMS.— Sam Vye, CEO and founder, SYOS
The SU10 runs AAIMS (Autonomy and Augmented Intelligence Mission System) on an open architecture that lets operators plan, re-task, and coordinate vehicles across domains in real time. Live data streams are prioritised as missions evolve, replacing post-mission analysis with in-mission understanding. The system filters raw data to highlight what matters rather than overwhelming operators with noise.
The result: an operator can task a surface vessel, an aerial drone, and the SU10 from the same interface. As we noted July 8, Apeiron Labs raised $9.5 million for autonomous underwater ocean monitoring. A different company, same thesis: subsea autonomy is shifting from bespoke military programmes toward commercial-off-the-shelf platforms. The company is betting its open-architecture approach accelerates that shift.
Subsea Infrastructure Gets a Cheap, Persistent Watch
The SU10 is designed for mine countermeasures, maritime surveillance, subsea infrastructure protection, and anti-submarine warfare support. It uses a fibre-optic tether for live control at depths of 500 metres. Payload capacity is 10 kilograms, enough for sonar, cameras, or electronic warfare modules.
The timing is not accidental. In March 2026, the Pentagon's Defense Innovation Unit launched Project REEF, a joint US-UK solicitation for commercial systems that can detect and destroy undersea drones threatening ports and critical infrastructure. "Current solutions are fragmented, expensive, and limited in number," the solicitation said. It called for off-the-shelf sensors, edge processing, and autonomous platforms that can discriminate between a hostile UUV and a fishing vessel.
SYOS is not the only company reading that signal — Anduril delivered its Dive-LD large UUV to the US Navy's Unmanned Undersea Vehicle Squadron 1 in Keyport, Washington, in April 2025 under the Replicator initiative. Its larger Dive-XL, an 11-metre autonomous mothership with a 2,000-nautical-mile range, was selected in March 2026 for the Navy's Combat Autonomous Maritime Platform project. Cardona Marine Group unveiled the SP-7V2 stealth attachment drone in February 2026, a 13-foot vehicle that can clamp onto the bottom of a ship and stay there for weeks.
We're a business focused on building multi-domain solutions: designing vehicles and autonomy together, moving at pace through spiral development, informed by real-world feedback, to deliver advanced capability faster, and at a significantly lower cost-to-capability ratio.— Sam Vye, CEO and founder, SYOS
What distinguishes it is not depth rating or payload. The Dive-XL goes to 6,000 metres. The Cardona SP-7V2 carries 800 pounds of explosives. The company competes on a different axis: a single autonomy architecture spanning air, land, surface, and subsurface, sold at what it describes as a lower cost-to-capability ratio than any of the specialists. For a mid-tier navy that wants multi-domain uncrewed capability without integrating four vendor stacks, that pitch is the actual product.
In February 2026, the NZDF signed SYOS to a multi-domain contract covering air, land, and sea platforms signed by Defence Minister Judith Collins. The SU10 will be deployed later this year across planned annual Antarctic missions for long-range, under-ice mapping as part of an international research partnership. The UK MoD has separately shortlisted the company for Project NYX, a programme worth around £100 million developing autonomous wingman drones for British Army Apache attack helicopters.
It was named 2025 Company of the Year at the New Zealand Hi-Tech Awards and swept Business of the Year, Innovation, and International Trade at the 2026 Tauranga Business Awards. The company now employs roughly 150 people, around 60 percent of them engineers. It got there by selling hardware into active warzones. The SM300 USVs it supplied under a £30 million contract with the UK MoD are still operating in Ukraine. And by betting that the same autonomy stack that works above water will work below it.
Four years ago that bet looked eccentric for a startup in a Bay of Plenty beach town. Today it looks like the logical endpoint of a market where navies no longer want to buy four separate uncrewed systems from four separate vendors.
