A 20-month-old startup with 25 employees is building weaponized undersea drones inside a former marble and granite showroom on Washington Avenue in South Philadelphia, and the U.S. Navy is on the delivery list.
The company is Albacore, founded in early 2025 by Dante Vaisbort and John Huddleston, who put the first prototype together on a kitchen table near Rittenhouse Square. It says it has raised more than $10 million and holds a contract to supply the Navy. Units are also headed to Taiwan and to buyers Albacore declined to name.
Its product, Ghostfin, is an autonomous mini-submarine built to cross 1,000 nautical miles (1,151 miles) and put a kinetic payload into a warship. On August 25, Small Business Administration Administrator Kelly Loeffler and Michael Cadenazzi, assistant secretary of war for industrial base policy, toured the 20,000-square-foot plant to promote domestic weapons manufacturing.
Albacore’s Own Spec Sheet Lists a 200-Pound Payload
Albacore publishes Ghostfin’s numbers: a 102-inch base length, a 12.75-inch outer diameter, 425 pounds dry weight, 1,000 nautical miles of range, 30 days of endurance, and a maximum payload of 200 pounds. The founders described a 250-pound weapons payload to WHYY.
That 50-pound gap between the pitch and the published figure is worth pinning down before anyone signs for a fleet. Everything else lines up across sources, including the battery design Albacore credits for the range, which the company says gives Ghostfin ten times the transit distance of comparably sized vehicles.
The vehicle has also grown. Albacore’s Y Combinator listing from the Summer 2025 batch describes a six-foot drone submarine. The current spec sheet lists a 102-inch base length, which is 8.5 feet, with mission modules bolting on from there. Everything is built from commercial off-the-shelf parts so production doesn’t need specialized machinery, and two people can launch one from a beach, a pier, or a boat.
Early prototypes went into the Schuylkill River. Testing since then has moved to Florida.
Ukraine’s Sea Drones Wrote Albacore’s Business Case
Huddleston traces the company’s founding to the war in Ukraine, where unmanned systems exposed how unprepared the United States was for that kind of fighting. Ukrainian crews have spent three years proving that small, cheap unmanned boats can damage and sink warships worth hundreds of millions.
That record is not theoretical. DroneXL reported in June 2025 that a Ukrainian Magura V7 drone boat shot down Russian fighter jets, a world first. Last December, Ukraine claimed an underwater drone crippled a $500 million Russian submarine. The U.S. Navy had already started moving toward sea drones in 2024.
Huddleston said each Ghostfin “can do severe damage to gray-hulled vessels,” using the military term for warships. Vaisbort describes the technology as “a scaled-down version of what was used in World War II submarines,” rebuilt in a mass-producible autonomous form.
Two Federal Agencies Toured a South Philadelphia Showroom
Loeffler and Cadenazzi visited Albacore on August 25 to promote domestic weapons production. Loeffler told reporters on the tour that small businesses make up 70% of the U.S. defense industrial base, and credited recent tax changes including immediate expensing for research and development and 100% expensing for capital investment.
“This is happening in Pennsylvania, in downtown Philadelphia,” Loeffler said during the tour. Washington Avenue is South Philly rather than downtown, but the geography wasn’t the point of the visit. Cadenazzi’s office runs industrial base policy for the Department of War, including small business participation and Defense Production Act programs.
Albacore intends to build 75 vehicles a year at the Washington Avenue site and eventually several thousand. It plans to at least triple its 25-person staff within a year, hiring recent high school and college graduates alongside engineers from other aerospace manufacturers. Andrew Wong, the company’s associate director of federal affairs, described the assembly work this way: “It’s almost like building Legos, very complicated Legos, albeit.”
Vaisbort cited Philadelphia’s shipbuilding history as a reason to base the company here. Hanwha Philly Shipyard was awarded $2 billion in July to build two missile-tracking vessels for the Missile Defense Agency.
Taiwan Deliveries Put Ghostfin Inside the Indo-Pacific Plan
Albacore names coastal defense of an island like Taiwan as its lead use case, and units are headed there. Huddleston argues that enough Ghostfins in a waterway make an amphibious invasion impractical, which is the same arithmetic behind the Pentagon’s thinking on the Taiwan Strait.
That thinking has a name. Admiral Samuel Paparo’s drone hellscape strategy calls for flooding the strait with thousands of cheap unmanned systems to buy time during an invasion. Ghostfin is the underwater version of that idea, at a price point that assumes losses.
Australia got there first with a partner. Anduril’s Ghost Shark went from concept to a A$1.7 billion (about $1.1 billion) five-year contract with the Royal Australian Navy in roughly three years, and the company opened a Sydney factory to build them. Albacore is aiming much smaller and much cheaper, which is the entire argument for buying hundreds instead of dozens.
DroneXL’s Take
A 20-month-old undersea startup got a Navy contract and a cabinet-level tour this week. Six days from now, on September 2, the FCC’s comment window closes on a proposal to ban previously authorized foreign drones that American operators already own and fly.
Section 232 drone tariffs take effect the day after that. Same government, same week, two opposite theories of how you build an industry.
One objection is fair. An armed submarine built in Philadelphia and a Chinese quadcopter on a roof inspection are not the same policy problem, and the data questions attached to the second one are real. But the FCC docket doesn’t stop at data. It reaches hardware Americans already bought, and there’s no domestic replacement at that price for the operators who lose it. Washington is funding one kind of American drone capability while pulling another off the market, and calling both industrial policy.
What nobody has said is what the Navy actually bought. No contract value, no program name, no delivery date, and no award announcement from the Navy or the Department of War. Albacore’s own public news listing still stops at last October’s $6.5 million seed round. For a company whose entire argument is mass production at scale, the difference between a handful of evaluation units and a program of record is the whole company, and that number is missing from the middle of the story.
The way I read Tuesday’s tour, the government showed up because the narrative is excellent. Kitchen table to Navy supplier in 20 months, inside a marble showroom. That story writes itself, and it deserves the attention. The model underneath it is proven, just not by the Pentagon. Ukraine proved it in public, with cheap hulls and a feedback loop measured in weeks.
So the real test of Ghostfin isn’t whether it works underwater. It’s whether American procurement can actually buy 75 of them a year from a company that had a wall of 3D printers in a Rittenhouse Square apartment 20 months ago.
Source: WHYY.
DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.
