Anduril today announced the acquisition of Popoto Modem, an underwater acoustics company based in Massachusetts.

The future of maritime dominance hinges on the ability of a single operator to command dozens, even hundreds, of vehicles at once. That places a priority on persistent, resilient, and affordable communications infrastructure. That requirement, however, is complicated by the nuances of the undersea domain: sound waves are the only signal that travels a meaningful distance through water, making them the only way to transport the high-fidelity, low-latency data required to connect assets from surface to sub-sea.

To make matters worse, undersea acoustic communications equipment has historically been prohibitively expensive, placing an upper limit on the size of undersea maritime formations. As a result, undersea communications are largely point-to-point links between exquisite platforms — an architecture that doesn’t scale to the desired end state where a single operator can control many affordable autonomous systems.

Popoto Modem’s acoustic communications technology changes that equation, enabling persistent, multi-node mesh networking underwater that lets autonomous vehicles communicate with each other, with surface vessels, and the broader fleet simultaneously. Anduril has worked with Popoto Modem for over a year, integrating their affordable acoustic modems into a variety of products across Anduril’s family of maritime systems.

Acquiring Popoto Modem will accelerate Anduril’s efforts to develop, produce, and deploy a fleet of autonomous underwater systems. The immediate priority is scaling integrations into Anduril’s Copperhead family of affordable autonomous underwater vehicles (AUV), enabling a single operator to command and oversee large formations of AUVs while maintaining confidence that every vehicle stays in contact and on task.

Dominance of the undersea domain demands systems that operate together, rather than individually. That construct has underpinned Anduril’s work across every domain. Recently, at BlueTIDE 2026 and in the U.S. Navy’s Lanternfish exercise, Anduril demonstrated how Lattice fuses disparate platforms above the waterline into a single operating picture, creating an integrated system to streamline port defense. Acquiring Popoto Modem enables Anduril to extend that integration to subsea, unlocking the affordable undersea communications mesh network required to deploy systems at scale.

Popoto Modem brings a flexible, agile acoustic hardware to the software and platforms Anduril has already built, allowing us to deliver more capable undersea systems to customers faster.

By Anduril Industries, Oct. 2, 2026