Tucked away among the superyachts of the 2026 Palm Beach Boat Show was the ENVGO NV1, a 26 foot electric hydrofoiling leisure boat that impressed with its speed, range and striking design. Long before drones were making headlines in war zones, a group of engineers in the Canadian tech hub of Waterloo, just outside Toronto, was developing early UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) that incorporate artificial intelligence, autonomous flight control and robotics. Listen to this article as a podcast The drones were designed for things like high danger industrial inspections and disaster zone assistance. They needed to have 100% reliability in every kind of weather and terrain condition. Operator training time couldn’t always be assured. So the drones had to be not just ‘smart’, but also easy and instinctive to use. Those are exactly the kinds of technologies and attributes needed for a high performance electric hydrofoiling leisure boat and the migration of that pioneering drone work to the new ENVGO NV-1 is one of the things that go into making the boat’s debut so impressive. Reliable, smart, easy to use The six co-founders of ENVGO all worked together developing that UAV technology at Aeryon Labs, which was sold in 2019 for about $200M. For techie types out there, it is the system behind the Teledyne FLIR SkyRanger R70. Mike Peasgood, co-founder of Aeryon and now CEO of ENVGO, grew up sailing, windsurfing and fishing and just loved being out on the water. He also loved fast, high performance automobiles, but not their combustion engines. When electric cars came along he was excited to see them bring instant torque, super low maintenance and ease of use to drivers and – like many others now in the electric boat world – he kept looking for the boat that would offer those same features and benefits. After the drone company was sold, he had time to seriously think about how to solve the problem of getting a clean tech solution on the water. He suggested to some of the core Aeryon team that the marine space might be a good area for applying their talents and experience to develop the next new and exciting thing. 10 times more power to push a boat through water While none of them were really ‘boat people’, they were engineers and problem solvers who, as Mike says “like a challenge and like building really cool technology that doesn’t exist in the world. This was a really cool challenge, and the other huge driver was the idea of creating a better future where we could bring a clean tech solution to the industry, help clean up our lakes and rivers.” Taking the classic engineering approach, the first step was analyzing whether there was an opportunity to build a technology solution that solves a real problem. The real problem is the physics that face all electric marine propulsion: it takes about 10 times as much power to push a boat through water as it does to push a car through air. For slower boats that is not necessarily an issue, but for high performance boats it is a significant challenge. An obvious solution – especially if you come from the world of making things fly – is to take the hull out of the water and have it travel through the air. That’s hydrofoiling. And it uses about a quarter the energy of a traditional boat. The assignment was perfect for the drone engineers. As Mike says, “It’s not a marine design challenge. It’s an aerospace design challenge. It was right in their sweet spot.” The team started by building a small proof of concept boat, about the same size as their UAVs – one metre (three feet) long. They were looking at adapting the Aeryon technology and figuring out the differences between being in the water versus being in the air. Next came a 3.6m (12 ft) single person hydrofoiler, which is when their drone technology started to come to the fore, ready for modification. Hydrofoiling an aerospace challenge, not marine A hydrofoiling boat is similar to a quadrotor (four propeller) drone like the ones Aeryon developed. They both have a strong tendency to flip upside down if left to their own devices. Mike explained to me that traditional small planes are actually quite stable. If you let go of the controls that determine the pitch (front to back level) and roll (side to side level), they will still basically stay on course and you only have to control the altitude. “But with a quadrotor drone – or hydrogoiling boat – you need a real time flight controller in there, a piece of hardware that is measuring the roll and pitch of the vehicle all the time, and updating the controls really, really quickly.” Like 250 times a second quickly. That, in turn, requires sensors. There’s a unit inside the boat that works in conjunction with accelerometers and gyroscopic sensors that are identifying how quickly things are rolling and pitching in the orientation of the boat. Outside the boat, radar sensors measure the height of the hull above the surface while sonar sensors measure the depth of the water underneath. Then there is a GPS sensor so the system knows where the boat is in the world and how fast it’s going. Read: Australia gets electric hydrofoiling ferries All of this information is fed to the flight controller, which then sends out the commands to the hydrofoiling apparatus. That consists of one foil under the hull across the beam of the boat, about halfway between midship and the transom. Two vertical struts raise and lower that foil and also have propulsion motors of about 110 kW each (≈ 150 hp, 220 kW / 300 hp in total). Under the bow there is a much smaller foil with no propulsion. The foils have ‘elevators’, just as an airplane wing does, flaps that are moved up and down to control the height of the boat (pitch). Ailerons at the tips of the rear foil adjust to control the roll. Focus on electric hydrofoiling leisure boat At the same time ENVGO was building their prototypes, they were also evaluating another important part of success – the market opportunity – what other players there are, what they are building and who they are building it for. There are only a handful of major electric hydrofoiling companies: Artemis (UK), Candela (Sweden), MobyFly (Switzerland), Navier (USA) and Vessev (New Zealand). While most have boats available for the recreational / leisure user, they are all more focused – to varying degrees – on the commercial ferry, watertaxi and work boat markets. True to Mike Peasgood’s original thoughts, ENVGO had always seen itself as building high performance boats for individual owners and they decided that sticking to that vision was the best route forward. They knew they had an amazing engineering team, but they also knew that they needed equally talented people in the worlds of naval architecture and boat design to build something really beautiful and as fast and efficient as they knew it could be. They found the first piece of the puzzle just an hour and a half drive away, in Midland, Ontario. Steve Killing is a Canadian yacht designer and naval architect who started with C&C Yachts in 1973 and has a few championship C-Class sailboat hydrofoil designs to his credit. In 2013, when New Zealand’s America’s Cup team decided to be the first to launch a foiling AC72 and fly with both hulls clear of the water, they called on Steve to help with hull development and other design elements. So did ENVGO. Worked on 1st America’s Cup foiling yachts Killing brought his experience to the bottom of the NV1 hull, and for the top and aesthetics he connected ENVGO with J. David Weiss of Designova. Weiss has designed more than 50 vessels worldwide, of every size and description, and has been cited as a leading Industry Disruptor in the Future Yachts book from BOAT International. The NV-1 at Palm Beach showcased Weiss’ vision of a futuristic silhouette that is also vaguely retro, with curves and a body contour that evokes an overall vibe of space travel, even while sitting at the dock. The interior has room for six while also accommodating the retracting struts of the rear foil in bulkheads behind the passenger seats. Like a performance car, it is all built and designed for the driving experience. I had the chance to go out on the NV1 a couple of months before the Palm Beach Show. I was there with other members of the boating and general media, almost none of whom had ever been on an electric boat – let alone one that also flies on hydrofoils. As always, everyone is struck by how an electric boat moves away from the dock without any noise whatsoever. The surprise was even more pronounced because the shape and feel of the NV1 implies the kind of big power and speed that people equate with big noise. At slower speeds the NV1 behaves just like any boat of similar size. Then, at about 20 knots (37 kph / 23 mph), the hull begins to rise, almost imperceptibly at first, a bit like when an airplane first takes off. “Technology plus a beautiful piece of artwork” It takes a couple of seconds, but you then realize that you are in the air. Even though you are travelling at significant speed, it feels more like you’re floating than flying. We were out on a fairly calm day, but there were still waves, and there is a bit of a disconnect because you can see them underneath you but the boat is unaffected. The ride is rock solid. It is literally like no other boat you have ever been on. In terms of piloting the boat, ENVGO’s flight controller technology does all of the work. It does not require much more adjustment than if you are driving a traditional boat that is new to you. For those who wonder what happens if the foils hit an underwater object, they are built to handle small underwater debris without issue, and are designed to shear off at a specific point in the case of a collision with a larger object like a rock or log. Charging can be done dockside with Level 1 (Level 2 if avai
