4.5.23-AI-Navier

- Hi, everyone. Hi, good afternoon. I'm Sampriti Bhattacharya and I'm the founder and CEO of Navier. I'm a MIT alum, PhD 2017, and a bunch of my team members are also from MIT. Oops, sorry.

So what's Navier? At Navier we are building America's next generation maritime company. Our goal is to develop the most compelling zero emission marine vessels that are drastically lower in operational cost, to enable a whole new kind of clean, scalable waterborne transportation for congested coastal cities and islands. So there was a time when people used to move on the water, and 46% of the world lives on the water.

But at the turn of the century, cars became more efficient and the waterways were replaced by highways. Now those highways and those cities are now congested. So the reason we don't move on the water is that cars are like 15 times more cheaper for the same-sized boat.

So the thesis on which Navier unit was brought alive is that, if we can move goods and people on the water at the same cost, speed, and convenience as land-borne option, then waterways are no more an obstacle, rather another highway. So how do we do it? Well, we just launched our first product, Navier 30 or the N30, that is 90% cheaper to operate using electric hydrofoiling technology.

And how that works, well, we start with the physics of it. The reason it is really inefficient with the traditional hull is that you're pushing water. So if you put wings under the boat, essentially you lift the boat above the water. You reduce the hydrodynamic drags.

And the way you do it is a bit like a fighter jet. You actually have active hydrofoil here, which you control by a computer on board and a bunch of sensor suite that you use for your feedback control. And as you fly above the wave, there is no seasickness, which makes this ride very, very smooth.

N30 actually is right now the world's longest range electric boat, and America's first all-electric hydrofoilic boat. So here's a quick clip of the boat in San Francisco. As you can see, it's riding above the waves and going smoothly.

Now you already have a computer on board. The next feasible step is to actually put a full on-board autonomy on it, because that gets rid of the labor costs as is associated in driving in commercial boats. It's pretty expensive to have a captain on board. So what it does is that from right now, the MVP we have in autonomous control.

And what we look towards in the future is to have full autonomy. And that's one of the key areas that we work in. In our customer product that we are releasing this year, we will have one-click auto docking which we actually announced earlier at CES. So in terms of the business, we are really a company with software at the core.

And our business model initially is focused a lot in direct sales, like OEM sales. And that really helps us to bring the volume cost down and essentially also helps us to gather the data that we need for developing area 5 autonomy. Now how does the disruption look like. So, giving an example in the Bay Area, you know, we have so much traffic.

But we have ferries. But there is only 10 ferry terminals and 5 routes. So what happens when you have a small vessel that it's possible that every marina is now a terminal, and you go from 5 routes to basically 2,000 routes. Suddenly the waterfront is accessible. More waterfront infrastructure can develop.

And then it demands more water taxi. You have opened a whole new mode of transportation. And beyond that, just going beyond autonomous water taxi, what we look for is autonomous single container barges. We are placing bets on small scalable marine vessels.

Now we have developed this in lightning speed. We started with a concept sketch in last year, January, 2022. But we did things very unconventionally. We started with the sketch and we went for the full-scale vessel production right here in Lyman-Morse in Maine.

And at the same time we made a smaller scale platform and really good simulation software, where we developed our control system. And by middle of the year last year we had the vessel integrated, and we were still developing most of the control system in the test platform. By October we had a sea trial. And this year we just launched our second vessel.

This is not yet public. It will be released in news in the next two weeks. This is the world's first all-electric flying water taxi.

Yeah, we have done over 500 hours in terms of testing. And all of this data actually helps us to better our simulation and also develop better control systems. And we have tested in very, very crazy conditions, like 60 miles per hour gust and really choppy waters in the bay. So in terms of ask, you know, right now we are obviously doing OEM sales and also starting a few mobility pilots.

And we are definitely looking to chat with folks in mobility transportation, EV shipping logistics. Those are areas of big interest to us as well as looking at use cases beyond recreational, as like and mobility like defense, Navy work vessels. And if you're in manufacturing and component suppliers come talk to us. And if you have marine fleets, we love to talk about data partnerships as well. Thank you so much.