The boat decided gravity was negotiable.
It is a Tuesday morning, somewhere off Treasure Island. A 30-foot vessel pushes away from the dock. For a moment it behaves like every other boat ever built - hull in the water, wake building behind it, the small physics of displacement. Then, at about 18 knots, something rude happens. The hull lifts. The wake collapses. Three carbon foils hidden beneath the boat take the weight, and the entire deck rises about four feet into the air. The engine noise, which was never very loud to begin with, drops to almost nothing. The passengers, who were braced for chop, are not bouncing. They are gliding.
This is the Navier N30. It is the first 100% electric hydrofoiling boat built in America. It is also a quiet rebuke to about a hundred years of boat design.
Sampriti Bhattacharyya was working on her PhD at MIT when Malaysia Airlines flight 370 vanished over the South China Sea. The disappearance lodged itself somewhere in her engineering brain. The world, it turned out, was full of ocean, and we were terrible at moving through it. She had been building underwater robots. She started building something larger.
Navier was founded in 2019. The early thesis was unfashionable: that boats were due for the kind of clean-sheet reinvention that cars and planes had already begun. Lithium batteries had quietly gotten good enough. Carbon composites had quietly gotten light enough. Control-system software, the kind aerospace people had been writing for decades, was just sitting there, waiting to be aimed at the water.
In 2021 Paul Bieker - the naval architect behind multiple America's Cup campaigns - joined to lead the hydrofoil design. With him came a particular pedigree of obsession: foiling is, mechanically, the most efficient way to push a hull through water, and it is also the most demanding thing to control. Get it wrong and the boat slams. Get it right and it flies.
Navier got it right.
Hydrofoils are not new. Engineers have been bolting wings to the bottoms of boats since the 1900s. What is new is the brain. Navier's active foil control system continuously adjusts the geometry of its three foils, dozens of times a second, based on what it senses in the water below. The result is a deck that stays level even when the bay does not.
Two main foils and a rudder foil, all carbon composite. They take the weight at speed and the hull stops touching the water.
Twin 90 kW electric motors. Silent operation. Zero local emissions. The marine engine, but politer.
The N30 docks itself. Joystick maneuvering moves the boat sideways or spins it in place. The marina cringe ends here.
It's a boat and a plane.Sampriti Bhattacharyya, founder & CEO
Stripe signed on as the inaugural partner for a Bay Area commuter pilot - employees taking a quiet, zero-emission shuttle across water that has been there the whole time, mostly unused.
The N30 is small enough to function as a chase boat or tender for larger vessels, and quiet enough that the people on the larger vessel will not hate it.
An agreement with JIH Global Investment will deploy up to 100 N30s across the Maldives over three years, replacing combustion ferries between islands.
The U.S. Navy has taken a look. A foiling, quiet, electric craft has uses that have nothing to do with day-cruising the bay.
Navier has raised roughly $17M+ in disclosed seed capital across early and 2022 rounds. The list of names is, charitably, unusual for a boat company.
Google co-founder. Early backer.
Joe Montana's fund. Yes, the quarterback.
Co-lead on the 2022 seed round.
Android co-founder. Hardware sympathizer.
Seed-stage tech investor.
Global growth investor.
Words can only do so much for a vessel whose entire trick is what happens at 18 knots. The video below is more useful than another paragraph.
Return to that Tuesday morning. The boat has now reached the other side of the bay. It begins to slow. The foils retract their lift. The hull settles, gently, back onto the water - the kind of landing that does not feel like landing. The passengers step off. There is no smell of fuel. There is no slick on the water where the engine has been. The wake the boat leaves behind it is, generously, a ripple.
The marina, which has heard combustion engines all morning, gets a few seconds of unusual quiet. Then the next boat starts up - diesel, loud, displacing water the old way. For a moment the contrast is almost embarrassing. The Navier N30 has not solved waterborne transportation. It has just shown, in a fairly specific 30-foot way, what solved would look like.
Five more N30s are about to start service in the Maldives. A pilot fleet is moving Stripe employees across the bay. The Navy has taken notes. Somewhere in San Francisco, the next boat is being built. The water, which has been the same for a very long time, is about to be used differently.