Mitch Lee

On a March morning in 2026, Arc announced two things at once: a fresh $50 million in the bank and a plan to put electric propulsion inside the tugboats that shove cargo ships around the busiest port in the Western Hemisphere. For a company that started by selling a $300,000 pleasure cruiser to people who own second homes, it was a swerve. For Mitch Lee, it was the whole point.

Lee runs Arc, the Los Angeles marine-technology company he co-founded in 2021 with Ryan Cook. The pitch is simple enough to fit on a bumper sticker and audacious enough to sound absurd: make everything that floats electric. Wake boats. Center consoles. Workboats. Tugs. Eventually, the argument goes, the entire industry - and the fumes that come with it - gets left in the wake.

His diagnosis of the status quo is less diplomatic. A typical gas boat, Lee says, is "an oversized lawnmower with technology from the 1980s" - loud, smelly, thirsty, and expensive to keep running. Arc's boats are the counter-argument: quiet enough to hear the water, quick off the line, and, he insists, cheaper to own once you stop feeding them fuel.

The market he's poking is bigger than it looks. Recreational boating contributes roughly $60 billion to the U.S. economy, yet the product itself has barely changed in a generation. Noise pollution, dangerous fumes, poor fuel efficiency, high maintenance - Lee ticks through the pain points like a man reading a list he's had memorized since childhood. The industry, in his telling, is not broken so much as frozen. And frozen industries are exactly where a well-timed thaw makes fortunes.

The Lee family did not merely enjoy boating. They were fanatics. Family legend holds that Mitch's mother waterskied on the morning of her wedding - curlers still in her hair - before changing into the dress. That is the household that raised him: one where the water came first and the ceremony could wait.

He grew up on the California Delta, the maze of channels where the Sierra Nevada's rivers unspool through the Central Valley. It is a fine place to learn to love a boat, and a fine place to notice everything wrong with one - the two-stroke haze hanging over a ski run, the noise that drowns out conversation, the engine that needs babying every spring. Those grievances would sit quietly for two decades before Lee did anything about them.

As a kid he was also, improbably, fascinated by stocks and compound interest. That curiosity followed him to Northwestern, where he double-majored in mechanical engineering and economics - the rare student equally at home in a machine shop and a spreadsheet. He spent a semester studying abroad in Melbourne, and, in an independent study that reads like foreshadowing, teamed up with a classmate named Ryan Cook to take apart a 3D printer and put it back together.

Northwestern also ran him through its Design Thinking and Communication program, the two-quarter gauntlet that drops first-year engineers into real design problems with real constraints. Cook, for his part, practically lived in the Technological Institute's machine shop, building things for class and for the sheer fun of it. Two undergraduates who liked to argue and liked to build - the raw ingredients of a company were already in the room, a decade before anyone poured them into one.

Lee's first job out of college was about as far from a lake as engineering gets. He went to Boeing as a stress analyst, working on the composite rotor blades of the AH-64 Apache attack helicopter in Mesa, Arizona. Cook was there too. The two spent their days pressure-testing designs and, in Lee's words, developing "an enthusiasm for brainstorming" that outlasted the job by a decade.

Then Lee zagged. He moved back to the Bay Area and retooled as a software developer, spending roughly seven years writing code. In 2015 he founded Penny, a personal-finance startup, took it through Y Combinator in 2017, and eventually saw it acquired by Credit Karma. Cook, meanwhile, zigged the other direction - into hardware at its most extreme, becoming a lead engineer at SpaceX.

So here were two friends who had split into the two great tribes of modern engineering: one fluent in atoms, one fluent in bits. When they finally reunited to build Arc, each brought the half the other lacked. Lee frames the choice to leave software plainly - after his company was acquired, he wanted to build something physical, something with an unambiguously positive footprint on the world. The idea of an electric boat floated, naturally, to the top.

Arc's strategy borrows openly from Tesla: build a premium product first, prove the technology, then march downmarket and outward into fleets. It is not a coincidence that one of Arc's lead investors, Greg Reichow, ran production at Tesla. The playbook rewards patience and punishes anyone who fakes it.

Lee is selective about what Arc builds in-house. The company owns the parts that make an electric boat actually work - the battery packs, the powertrain, the thermal systems, and the software - because, as he puts it, those are what "really set us apart." The upholstery and the windshields get outsourced, at least until they become bottlenecks. In an industry where boats have long been assembled piecemeal from a catalog of suppliers, owning the electrons is the moat. "Our moat is growing by the day," he says.

That software layer does more than run the motor. It watches the battery, calculates range in real time, and warns a captain before a fun afternoon turns into a long paddle home - Arc's answer to range anxiety, the same fear that once haunted electric cars. Lee is betting the fear evaporates the same way it did on land: quietly, one uneventful trip at a time.

The co-founder dynamic underneath all of it is worth pausing on, because Lee volunteers it freely. He is, by his own cheerful admission, contrarian by reflex. Cook could say the sky is blue and Lee would take the other side just to test the seam. It sounds like a recipe for gridlock; in practice it is quality control. Cook, steeped in SpaceX's first-principles culture, questions whether the industry's conventional wisdom deserves to survive at all. Lee questions everything else. What gets built at Arc has already survived an argument.

The bet, ultimately, is on execution over cleverness. "It sounds pretty simple on paper," Cook has said of building an electric boat. "The hard part is execution." Lee agrees, which is why he frames Arc's risk not as whether people want better boats - he takes that as given - but whether his team can actually manufacture them, week after week, without cutting the corners that would betray the whole premise.

Recreational boats put Arc on the map. Commercial ones may be where the mission lives or dies. In 2026 the company signed a $160 million contract with Curtin Maritime to deliver eight hybrid-electric tugboats - 4,000-horsepower workhorses - starting at the Port of Los Angeles. Tugs run brutal duty cycles and never leave the harbor, which makes them, oddly, an ideal place to prove electric propulsion. The first one is slated to hit the water within the year.

The Series C that followed - $50 million from Eclipse, a16z, Menlo Ventures, Lowercarbon Capital and others - was raised explicitly to chase commercial workboats and defense applications while keeping the sport-boat business humming. The recreational side, in the Tesla analogy, is the Roadster. The tugs and workboats are where the volume, and the emissions, actually are.

Lee's north star hasn't moved since the Delta: "electrify everything on the water." He measures the company not by market risk - he's convinced the market wants this - but by execution risk. His conviction is almost stubbornly simple. "If we succeed at making better boats," he says, "they will sell."

That conviction now has a physical address: a 150,000-square-foot factory in Los Angeles where more than 100 people build boats that once existed only as a sketch and an argument between two friends. Arc has gone from delivering its first customer boat to producing multiple boats a week - the unglamorous, grinding proof that a hardware company is real. Anyone can render a beautiful electric boat. Shipping them on a schedule is the part that separates a press release from a company.

There's a tidiness to the whole arc of it, if you'll forgive the pun. The Delta kid who resented the fumes. The economics major who thinks in compounding returns. The Boeing engineer who learned to stress-test a design until it either held or failed honestly. The software founder who wanted, one day, to build something you could touch and stand on and drive across a lake. Arc is all four of those people at once, pointed at the same stretch of water Lee grew up on - and, if he's right about the moat, at every stretch of water after that.