1.23.24-Japan-Navier

KENNETH JENSEN: Hello, everyone. It's an honor to be here. My name is Kenny Jensen. I'm the CTO of Navier. We are MIT alum, founded and run, company that aims to be America's next generation maritime company, with the goal of really transforming how people and goods are moved around on the water.

And just as a teaser, this is our first product, the N30. You can see it here flying above the waters of Lake Tahoe in California. And unlike a traditional boat, it's not floating on the surface of the water. It is really flying above it. There are hydrofoils underneath the water that provide lift, and pull the boat up out of the water.

So what problem are we trying to solve? The high level problem is that the maritime industry is very much a legacy industry that doesn't innovate very rapidly. And we want to change that. Some of the specific problems are boats are very expensive to operate. They're very inefficient. They get less than a kilometer per liter of gas. They have internal combustion engines, which are expensive to maintain.

They also have horrible ride quality. You feel every wave you go over. And this is more important for smaller scale vessels, which the waves have an enormous effect on. And finally, they're bad for the environment. Because they're so inefficient, they're burning a lot of gasoline, and I'm personally a big believer that everything is going to electrify. Cars are already electrifying. People are trying to electrify aircraft. So we're taking on electrifying the maritime space.

So what's the solution to these problems? So the main thing is, why are we plowing through the water when we can fly above it? The key there is hydrofoils. So these really are just airplane wings that you put underneath the water. It's the exact same physics that makes an airplane fly. And you can see our boat, on the right, on the left there has three hydrofoil wings on the bottom. As the boat accelerates forward, those generate lift, and lift the boat up out of the water.

So hydrofoiling by itself adds a huge amount of efficiency because you're not you aren't subject to the drag from the water. But on top of hydrofoils, we also want to make the boat electric. So this adds more efficiency. So together hydrofoils plus electric motors make us more than 10 times as efficient as a traditional gas boat.

And finally, another significant cost of boats are that they typically have to have a captain. We want boats to be fully autonomous. We're building that in from day one. So our boats will have a vision based autonomy system.

So you combine all that together and you get to our first product. This is the N30. It's the America's first all electric boat. It's 10 times cheaper to operate than a gas boat. It's the world's longest range electric boat. We have a range of more than 150 kilometers.

A completely quiet operation. You can have a normal conversation when you're riding in the boat. You don't have to talk loud. And it's a very smooth ride. You can literally work on your laptop inside the boat while you're moving through the water.

But we don't just want to be a recreational boat company. We really want to make a dent in how people and goods are transported. And the next step there is we want to be a mobility company. So if you look at the map on the left, this is the Bay Area where the company is based. And the map on the left is all the routes where the current ferry system operates.

So there's very few routes. It doesn't operate very much. It's useful but most people still choose to drive and commute over bridges to work. What if we could bring in this technology? A really cheap vessel to operate that can go point-to-point. You don't need any special ferry terminal infrastructure. You can just operate them out of marinas. And you can hail them with something like an Uber-like app.

Then you really start to change how people move around. Instead of having to sit in traffic on a bridge, you can just go no traffic, on the water, point-to-point, across the Bay. And indeed, we've already started to partner with businesses in the area. So we just announced that we're partnering with Stripe to ferry their employees across the Bay, and reducing their commute time in half.

What might this look like in Japan? So Japan is an island nation. There's more than 14,000 islands. Most of the major cities are right on the water. So clearly, waterborne transportation is important thing. So we just sort of experimented with a few example routes. If you were going to try to get to Okinawa to Yanbaru National Park, it's going to be an hour and a half drive. But if you were to take one of our vessels, it would be less than an hour. Another one if you're going to Chiba to Haneda Airport-- 50 minute drive assuming there's no traffic. And there probably will be traffic. On our vessel, less than 25 minutes. And you're guaranteed there won't be traffic.

So we've gotten a lot of traction so far. The company is just two years old. We built the first two prototype boats in lesson 14 months. They're full scale, 30 foot prototype boats. And they are actually the longest range electric boats in the world. We have thousands of hours of time operating them in the Bay at this point.

We've also been able to deploy some of the technology we've developed for this on US Navy projects. And like I said, we signed our first mobility contract. And you can see the picture on the right, we're actually developing a larger scale electric ferry at the same time to further that contract. And our vessels are currently sold out through 2024. And you can see we build our vessels in Turkey right now. And you can see the manufacturing team there.

So yeah, just to repeat, our mission is to enable a new era of clean waterborne transportation. And we're very interested in any partnerships here focused on autonomy, battery technology, electric vehicles, advanced manufacturing like composites, water taxi and ferry operators, and luxury hospitality. So please come find me in the booth if you're interested. Thank you.