A Home for Hydronalix

Maritime Company Finds Success in Sahuarita

By Tara Kirkpatrick

Hydronalix, a high-tech company whose robotic water and air rescue systems are used all over the world, has found Sahuarita to be the perfect town for its headquarters.

Even, perhaps, its secret weapon.

“When you think about a maritime company, it’s usually in a seaport town,” said Tony Mulligan, founder and CEO of Hydronalix. “For the first number of years, we didn’t want others in the industry to know what we were doing. It gave us a chance to grow and develop our technology.

“We also had another idea that if we trained and educated people who live in Sahuarita how to do this work, our retention would be higher because they want to live here.” Mulligan said. “We were looking for the long haul, people that would want to spend their entire careers with us.”

He has done just that. Founded in 2009, Hydronalix is a leader in extreme performance, small unmanned vehicles for water and air. A mechanical engineer, Mulligan leads a team of 47 people who pride themselves on design and development, test and evaluation, production, marketing and customer training and service. The company has produced more than 2000 systems to date.

His team comprises not only scientists and engineers, but also retired fire chief personnel and former military. “We train a lot of firemen and policemen and first responders from all over the world here.” Mulligan said.

Hydronalix tests and trains its products locally, on Sahuarita Lake and nearby Patagonia Lake, but also globally. Its team takes part in U.S. Marine Corps training exercises across Europe. The company also will soon open an office at the NATO training facility on the island of Crete.  “We send people from Sahuarita there,” he said. “We have 10 people in Sweden right now. We also have boats in 53 countries and about 900 locations that we work with.”

Sahuarita offers Hydronalix the trusted vendors, suppliers and other infrastructure of nearby Tucson, with a dedicated local workforce. Traveling all over the country only confirms Mulligan’s appreciation of the town for his company.

“The key to production isn’t that you’re on the water, but it’s that people do very high-efficiency, high-quality work, and so we get people here that are very dedicated and very passionate,” Mulligan said. “We feel very strongly that this is a very well-organized, planned out and well-run community.”

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