Navier, a San Francisco startup, just raised $7.2 million in seed money to build its all-electric foiling boats at the Lyman-Morse plant in Thomaston, Maine.
Navier announced that the seed money came from Global Founders Capital and Treble, among other firms, plus some individual investors. Lyman-Morse is already laying up the hulls of the first two Navier 27s, made with advanced composites and smart software.
Navier 27s are powered by two 50kW electric motors and foil, or fly, three to four feet above the water to reduce drag and improve efficiency. They use a foiling stabilization control system borrowed from the aerospace industry.
Navier says the new 27 will have a range of 75 nm at 20 knots, and that it will reduce operating costs by 90 percent, compared to a traditional gas marine engine.
The company plans to make 15 boats at Lyman this year, and to introduce them at the Fort Lauderdale show in November. Then it hopes to ramp up to 400 boats a year by 2024.
The Navier 27 has a beam of 8’ 6” and a draft of 2 feet with the foils retracted and 5’ 5” with them extended. It says the ride on foils is so smooth that it will reduce seasickness.
“Navier is much more than a boat company,” says Sampriti Bhattacharyya, the company’s co-founder who has a PhD from MIT. “We are fundamentally rethinking the boat as we know it.”
In the scheme of large international boat building revenue, Navier’s $7.2 million could almost be a rounding error. In fact, Brunswick reported sales of $433 million for its boat group in just the fourth quarter of last year, and its total corporate revenue for the year was $1.25 billion.
But electric power is clearly seen as the wave of the future. Indeed, the auto industry will invest half a trillion dollars in the next five years to transition to electric vehicles, according to Wedbush Securities. “It’s one of the biggest industrial transformations probably in the history of capitalism,” Scott Keogh, CEO of the Volkswagen Group of North America recently told The New York Times. Read more:
