Arc.

It is a Tuesday on the lake and the loudest thing on the water is a kid laughing. The boat throwing the wake behind him has no engine note, no blue haze, no smell of gas. It is an Arc - and the quiet is the entire point.

A boat company that thinks it's a software company

Arc Boat Company makes electric boats. Not gas boats with a battery wedged in where the tank used to be - boats designed around the battery from the first sketch. Out of a Los Angeles factory, Arc builds the battery packs, the motors, the marine-grade aluminum hulls and the software itself. The recreational lineup now runs three deep: the Arc One, the Arc Sport and the Arc Coast. And as of March 2026, with a fresh $50 million Series C, the company is pushing the same propulsion guts into tugboats and defense vessels.

The marine industry has spent a century perfecting the gasoline inboard. Arc's wager is that the perfecting is over, and the replacing has begun. That is either obvious or insane, depending on how recently you've paid for boat fuel.

Arc's stated ambition is to “electrify everything on the water.” - Arc's mission, as quoted across coverage of its 2026 raise

Boats are loud, dirty, and high-maintenance by tradition

A gas boat is a small machine with a large appetite for inconvenience. It burns fuel by the gallon, coughs fumes over the swim deck, vibrates the conversation out of your evening, and demands oil changes, winterizing and a mechanic on speed dial. Owners have accepted all of this because the alternative did not exist. That is the tension Arc was built around: the thing that makes a lake fun is also the thing fouling it.

Electric solved noise, fumes and maintenance in cars. The water just hadn't gotten the memo. Salt, weight, range anxiety with no charger for miles - the marine version of the problem is harder, which is exactly why nobody had cracked it at scale.

More than double the torque of most premium wake boats - and none of the engine roar. - The pitch, reduced to physics

Rocket people, car people, on the water

Arc was started in 2021 by Mitch Lee (CEO) and Ryan Cook (CTO). Cook was a lead engineer at SpaceX; the early team pulled in veterans of Rivian and Tesla. The bet was specific: the hard-won electric-vehicle playbook - battery management, motor control, over-the-air software, vertical integration - would transfer to boats faster than the boat industry could learn to build batteries.

It is a slightly unfashionable bet, in that it requires building almost everything yourself instead of buying parts off a shelf. Arc did it anyway, on the theory that you cannot bolt a great electric boat together from other people's compromises.

Will Smith, Kevin Durant and Sean “Diddy” Combs were among Arc's earliest backers - alongside a16z and Eclipse. - Cap table, abridged

Three boats, one powertrain, zero fumes

Arc started at the top with the Arc One, a roughly $300,000 24-foot luxury cruiser, to prove the platform could exist. Then it found a market that actually wanted what electric does best: watersports. The Arc Sport, a 23-foot wake boat, turned the battery's biggest liability - weight - into its best feature. About 3,000 pounds of cells sit low in the transom, doing double duty as ballast to shape bigger, cleaner wakes. In 2025 came the Arc Coast, a center console built to cruise.

Money follows the wake

Skeptics are right to ask whether a quiet boat is a business. The answer Arc keeps giving is a bigger check. Since 2021 it has stacked seed, Series A, B and C rounds into roughly $160 million, drawing in a16z, Eclipse, Menlo and Lowercarbon - the kind of investors who tend to leave when the physics doesn't work.

The recreational boats aren't just revenue - they're a durability lab. A wake boat hammered every summer weekend is a brutal test for a powertrain. Survive that, and a commercial buyer eyeing an electric tugboat starts to listen. That logic underpins a reported $160M deal with Curtin Maritime to build eight hybrid-electric tugboats for the ports of LA and Long Beach by 2027, plus retrofit work with the Port of LA and Diversified Marine.

Reviewers said the Arc Sport's launch “literally knocked us off our seats.” - Electrek, on the 500 hp test ride

Electrify everything that floats

Arc's mission fits on a bumper sticker and takes a decade to build: electrify everything on the water. Wake boats are the wedge. Center consoles widen it. Tugboats and defense propulsion are where the carbon math actually moves - a single working harbor vessel burns diesel a recreational boat never will. The consumer line earns attention and cash; the commercial line is where the mission gets serious.

The quiet is contagious

If Arc is right, the boat that wakes the lake stops being the boat that chokes it. The marina gets quieter. The swim deck stops smelling like a gas station. The mechanic's number gets used less. None of that is a slogan - it's just what happens when you delete the engine and keep the fun.

Back on that Tuesday lake, the kid surfacing behind the wake doesn't know or care that he's riding the leading edge of a marine power shift. He just knows the water smells like water, and the loudest thing out here is still him, laughing. Arc built that silence on purpose - and now it's trying to scale it all the way up to a working harbor.