ARLINGTON, Va., Aug. 06, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- HII (NYSE:HII) announced today long-term performance-based production agreements with High-Yield Production Robotics (HYPR) team members GrayMatter Robotics and Path Robotics. The signed agreements are designed to accelerate the development and deployment of advanced physical AI automation across U.S. Navy shipbuilding programs, including aircraft carriers, submarines, destroyers, amphibious ships, future frigates and unmanned surface vessels.

"We are committed to making generational investments to develop new shipbuilding capability and to expand capacity," said Eric Chewning, executive vice president of maritime systems and corporate strategy at HII. "Together, we are defining a new approach to robotics in shipbuilding: automation that can adapt to extreme levels of complexity, mix, and size. This collaboration represents a strategic investment in the future of American shipbuilding — strengthening industrial base resilience, expanding distributed shipbuilding capacity, feeding critical materials to our shipyards and workforce, and unlocking new production efficiencies essential to delivering the Navy’s growing fleet."

Under the agreements, HII intends to award up to $900 million in total shipbuilding work to Path Robotics and GrayMatter Robotics across seven years, contingent on the two companies meeting clearly defined technology and manufacturing readiness, and performance milestones outlined in the agreements. This sustained demand signal enables Path Robotics and GrayMatter Robotics to make significant long-term investments in robotics, autonomous systems, facilities and workforce required to deliver Navy-grade production at scale.

"For years, we've believed physical AI could fundamentally change manufacturing," said Andy Lonsberry, CEO and co-founder of Path Robotics. "HYPR is a powerful validation of our vision — that physical AI can scale shipbuilding capacity in one of the world's most demanding production environments. Together with HII, we're proud to be building the shipyard of the future, unlocking distributed shipbuilding, and establishing a blueprint for strengthening America's maritime industrial base."

"This agreement represents an important milestone in bringing Factory SuperIntelligence to America's leading shipbuilding company," said Ariyan Kabir, CEO and co-founder of GrayMatter Robotics. "By combining Physical AI with autonomous production systems, we're helping create manufacturing that learns, adapts, and improves over time, making complex shipbuilding faster, more resilient, and more scalable.

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Together with HII and Path Robotics, we're laying the foundation for the next generation of American industrial capability and helping ensure that the United States can build critical assets at the speed and scale our national security demands."

The performance-based production agreements are part of a broader set of strategic agreements that form the HYPR Program, including collaboration and joint development frameworks that establish governance, program execution, and long-term operational alignment among the companies. The companies expect the collaborative effort to push the boundaries of automation never seen before in shipbuilding.

The agreements are structured in two stages: a Navy-grade development stage and a delivery stage. In the development stage, both companies will partner with HII to develop, validate and qualify high-precision production techniques for autonomous welding, grinding, blasting, painting, assembly, inspection and other fabrication processes, then integrate them into an autonomous production line. The agreements establish a rigorous testing, qualification and oversight process to ensure that every technology meets the stringent standards of U.S. Navy shipbuilding. In the delivery stage, HII will begin sourcing shipbuilding work from both companies through the new line, contingent upon favorable cost, schedule and quality performance. The delivery stage is designed to augment HII’s current distributed shipbuilding strategy, starting with small steel structures and growing to include units and modules.

In 2026, HII plans to outsource more than 2.5 million hours of shipbuilding work, a 30% increase from 2025, while expanding its structural assembly network of assembly partner companies, enabling more work to be completed outside the shipyards before final assembly.

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About Path Robotics

Path Robotics builds physical AI for manufacturing, starting with its welding model, Obsidian™. Path Robotics’ intelligent welding cells perform the complex, variable welds that traditional automation cannot, enabling manufacturers to overcome chronic labor shortages while increasing production capacity, and improving quality. With the launch of Rove™, a mobile robotic welding system that pairs Obsidian with a quadruped robot, Path Robotics brings that same intelligent, adaptive welding capability into the field directly to the part, wherever it is. Since its founding in 2018, the company has raised more than $370 million to incorporate intelligence through physical AI into legacy manufacturing processes, turning traditionally impossible-to-automate work into reliable, high-throughput, and high-quality production. By combining artificial intelligence, machine learning and computer vision, Path Robotics’ physical AI enables legacy manufacturing processes to see, think, and adapt, in real time, turning the complexity that made automating these traditional processes impossible into a reality.

About GrayMatter Robotics

Headquartered in Carson, California, GrayMatter Robotics is building Factory SuperIntelligence that powers the autonomous factories of the future. Founded in 2020, the company develops Physical AI technologies and deploys autonomous factories that handle complex, high-mix tool-manipulation applications such as surface preparation, coating, and inspection processes across some of the most demanding production environments in the world — delivering up to 12x the throughput of skilled manual labor and a 95% reduction in rework. Its air-gapped, edge-deployed architecture ensures full data sovereignty for defense and enterprise-critical operations. To date, GrayMatter Robotics has processed over 30 million square feet of surface area across 20+ industries, serving customers in aerospace, defense, shipbuilding, specialty vehicles, and consumer products. The company is on a mission to reindustrialize American manufacturing and bolster our National Security, bridge the gap between demand and capacity of our industrial base, and ensure the industrial resilience the nation depends on. For more information, visit: https://factory.graymatter-robotics.com/

About HII

HII is America’s largest shipbuilder, delivering the world’s most powerful ships and all-domain mission technologies, including unmanned systems, to U.S. and allied defense customers. HII is the largest producer of unmanned underwater vehicles for the U.S. Navy and the world.

With a more than 140-year history of advancing U.S. national security, HII builds and integrates defense capabilities extending from the core fleet to C6ISR, AI/ML, EW and synthetic training. Headquartered in Virginia, HII’s workforce is 45,000 strong. For more information, visit:

HII on the web: https://www.HII.com/
HII on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TeamHII
HII on X: https://www.twitter.com/WeAreHII
HII on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/WeAreHII
HII on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/wearehii

Contact:

Danny Hernandez

(202) 264-7143

danny.j.hernandez@hii-co.com

Caroline Legg

clegg@path-robotics.com

(203) 313-4228

Christina Ko

christina@graymatter-robotics.com

(310) 431-9258

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