‘Like building Legos’
Albacore intends to initially build 75 vehicles per year at its South Philadelphia facility and would like to eventually produce several thousand units. The founders identified coastal defense — of an island like Taiwan, for example — as a prime use case for the devices.
“As we think about theater-level deterrence, especially in the Indo-Pacific, these each can do severe damage to gray-hulled vessels,” Huddleston said, referring to military ships. “If you have enough of these in a waterway, it makes it very difficult to do any island invasions. We started this because we wanted to prevent the next war from even starting, and we believe that that peaceful deterrence through strength is really the way to do that.”
The vehicles can also be used for commercial surveys of oil and gas areas and of minerals on the sea floor, and to collect data for oceanic research, he said.
The company has 25 people on staff and employs additional contractors and technicians, and plans to at least triple its headcount over the next year, the founders said. The workers include recent high school and college graduates, as well as more experienced staff who came from other aerospace manufacturers, said Andrew Wong, Albacore’s associate director of federal affairs.
“We want to give young people a chance to build something great for the country,” he said. “It’s a job that anyone can do, really. It’s almost like building Legos — very complicated Legos, albeit.”
Albacore’s website lists a dozen job openings, including for mechanical, electrical and software engineers.
Loeffler noted that the U.S. defense industrial base consists of 70% small businesses like Albacore. She said changes in tax regulations championed by the Trump administration were making it easier for them to succeed, including immediate expensing for research and development, 100% expensing for capital investment and a deduction for overtime pay.
“One of the biggest pain points of small businesses today is they want to hire more workers,” she said. “We have half a million jobs open in manufacturing today, and that’s why this administration is focusing on rebuilding the industrial base — because it provides not just national security, but economic opportunity.”