“Mines are kind of the original maritime asymmetric warfare, right? A naval mine can cost about two grand. You can just throw them off the side of the boat. So you can rapidly lay these minefields… But it costs, you know, typically 200x more in terms of money and time to clear that minefield.”
How I Invest with David Weisburd · Startups & Venture · October 2026
Mills, whose company builds low-cost undersea drones, explains why mine countermeasures became one of its focus areas. He describes the whole business as built around cheap systems that flip the cost of defeating targets in undersea warfare.
Transcript
…people don't always realize that because it's also the silent service, but we have the best, most capable submarine fleet in the world. And that gives us enormous power. World War II, 60% of Japanese shipping and I think naval assets were sunk by U.S. submarines, right? Yeah, it's a major impact.
And the defense part of your business, what percentage of your resources, capital, man hours are going towards developing asymmetric warfare.
Our entire company is based on asymmetric warfare, right? So we're building lower cost systems that make it cheaper, faster to defeat targets or collect data. And that goes from our core vehicles with the acoustic homing, so the ability to actually follow and seek moving targets, where essentially they're acting as a cheap torpedo, to our SIGRED mine countermeasure system, which can defeat minefields faster and lower cost. Interesting fact, right? You talk about asymmetry. Mines are kind of the original maritime asymmetric warfare, right? It can cost undersea mine, can cost naval mine, can cost about two grand. You can just throw them off the side of the boat. So you can rapidly lay these minefields as we've seen in Iran. But it costs, you know, typically 200x more in terms of money and time to clear that minefield, right? And so that's a real problem. And so that's why it was one of the areas we decided to focus on as a way to decrease that asymmetry we see there.
I'm still thinking about what you said on the Russia-Ukraine war. The naval destroyers from Russia are not leaving the port. To me, it's just such an example of the sunk costs fallacy. And what future war will the destroyers be safe leaving the port? And yet these countries hold on to them as if…
Yeah, I think that's generally true. I think like if you can put a preponderance of naval assets out there, like if you can have a fleet of destroyers, like there's a lot of capability there to destroy asymmetric assets, right? Like, you know, we look at the Straits of Formuz, right? The Yemenis…
Best case, they take out one ship and then there's 399.
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