Most people know Navier through the N30 Pioneer—a futuristic, high-performance vessel that flies above the water, and to many appears, at first glance, to be a luxury boat straight out of science fiction. That is only the surface. Then, there are those of you who have heard about our applications for water taxis, and a few others who are familiar with our work in defense.

So far, we have been quiet about the full scope of what we are doing—the why and the how of it. What fewer people see is the deeper architecture we are building, the long-horizon strategy behind it, and the world that becomes possible when maritime technology is rebuilt from first principles. As we prepare to embark on a new chapter of products and technology for Navier, I wanted to share the reality of what we are building out here.

The Navier Doctrine connects those dots.

It is a roadmap—technical, strategic, and philosophical—for advancing humanity’s next frontier: the ocean. It lays out the first-principles logic behind our platform, the systems we are building, the decisions that shaped our early and upcoming products, and a vision for maritime transformation rooted in physics-driven design, autonomy, and scalable architectures.

Underlying this doctrine is a simple belief: Human progress has always been tied to water—exploration, trade, safety, and connection. Our future will depend on returning to it with better tools and better systems.

While the impact of this transformation is global, it also speaks to a challenge close to home. Once a maritime leader, the United States holds just 0.1% of global commercial shipbuilding capacity. Our merchant fleet, ferries, and workboats—the vessels that power economies—have fallen behind, burdened by aging infrastructure, regulations and outdated manufacturing. Rebuilding shipyards alone will not solve this. Maritime will only make economic and strategic sense again if we rethink it from the ground up—and the focus to win must be broader than just the Navy.

This doctrine lays out how we intend to achieve that: through scalable platforms, dual-use architecture, a shared technology stack, and a future where high-speed coastal mobility, affordable island logistics, faster transoceanic shipping, and resilient maritime defense all emerge from the same foundational technology.

I didn’t start my career thinking about boats. I started with particle accelerators and designing nuclear reactors at Fermilab—places where physics is unforgiving and engineering must be precise. From there, I worked on autonomous aircraft at NASA, and then pursued a PhD at MIT, building the world’s first swarm-capable underwater micro-drones to map the oceans.

The through-line was simple: I have always been drawn to the hardest physical problems, especially the ones everyone else overlooked. I am driven by the question: why doesn’t the solution exist yet, and what must be solved to build it?

Building a company around a high-end electric vessel was never the point.  I didn’t see a niche luxury play.  I saw an industry stuck decades behind, full of inefficiencies, and a set of hard problems that, if solved, could transform the final frontier on this planet at a scale few can imagine.

A lesson emerged early in my career, perfectly articulated by Elon Musk: “Physics is the only law; everything else is a recommendation.”

Navier takes its name from Claude-Louis Navier, the physicist behind the Navier–Stokes equation—the mathematical foundation of fluid dynamics and one of the seven Millennium Prize Problems. At its core, maritime engineering is applied physics.

This conviction solidified in 2014, when the world watched a modern airliner—Malaysia Airlines Flight 370—simply vanish into the ocean. We didn’t know how to find it. Autonomous rovers were being sent to Mars, the skies filled with drones and satellites, yet 70% of our own planet remained unmapped, uninstrumented, and strategically overlooked. While space captured the imagination, the oceans—our true economic and security lifelines—had atrophied.

I founded Hydroswarm–an underwater drone company– in 2015 to close this gap, spending years at MIT as a PhD student developing core IP in controls, marine swarm coordination, and hydrodynamic design. That technology eventually found a home with a major defense prime, but my work was far from finished.

We didn’t build Navier because maritime is a “hot sector” or because defense tech is trending. Navier is the culmination of 15 years of rigorous work in maritime and aerospace, born from the realization that the industry was finally ready for innovation, driven by both technological maturity and urgent geopolitical and national security needs.

It is an attempt to rebuild an entire industry from the ground up. We are solving the fundamental inefficiencies of speed, drag, and scale with a hardcore First Principles approach, grounded in the belief that the next great frontier belongs to those who treat it with rigor, discipline, and the immutable laws of physics.

While the automotive and aerospace industries spent the last century optimizing for efficiency, scale, and software integration, maritime technology effectively anchored itself in the 1950s. Modern hulls and propulsion systems have seen only incremental improvements, and the consequences are severe: we have limited what is possible on the water by accepting physics that we should have engineered around.

Civilization began on the water. But in the 20th century, we abandoned waterways for highways as automotive transport became cheaper, faster, and more predictable. Maritime fell behind not because water is irrelevant—but because boats remain fundamentally broken across three dimensions we call the 3Cs: Cost, Comfort, and Convenience.

• Cost: Traditional hulls must push through water, which is roughly 1,000× denser than air. The result is massive hydrodynamic drag. A conventional planing hull is ~15× less energy-efficient than a car. Worse, this penalty is non-linear: as speed increases, energy consumption grows exponentially, not linearly. High speed on water quickly becomes uneconomic.

• Comfort: Conventional boats are at the mercy of sea state. Vertical accelerations—slamming—reduce passenger comfort, limit uptime, and introduce safety risks. In a world accustomed to the smoothness of a Tesla or a high-speed train, no one accepts a commute that is physically punishing. Comfort isn’t a luxury; it’s a prerequisite for adoption.

• Convenience: Maritime transport is hard to access. For people, it’s constrained to a small number of ferry terminals. For goods, to a handful of major ports. The idea of highspeed water taxis—or the equivalent of semi-trucks on water—largely doesn’t exist. We have ferries. We have cargo ships. What’s missing is a flexible, distributed, high performance network in between.

B. America Has Lost Maritime Leadership

How do we solve this as an American company when the country has ceded its shipbuilding capability? The contrast between our history and our current reality is stark.

In the wake of WWII, the U.S. led the world in shipbuilding, producing thousands of Liberty and Victory ships with unprecedented speed. Today, that industrial base has evaporated. The numbers paint a grim picture of our commercial maritime standing:

• The Output Gap: China currently produces over 1,700 ocean-going commercial vessels per year (accounting for over 50% of the global market). The United States produces fewer than five.

• The Fleet Collapse: Since 1960, the number of U.S. private oceangoing merchant vessels has plummeted by over 80%, leaving us with a fleet of fewer than 200 ships in international trade.

• Global Standing: By tonnage and order book volume, the United States now ranks 14th in global shipbuilding.

This is not just an economic failure; it is a strategic crisis. We did not prioritize shipbuilding, we allowed the Jones Act to insulate the market rather than innovate it, and we let our merchant fleet erode.

The result is a Navy confronting adversaries who deploy cheap, numerous, asymmetric systems while we rely on legacy platforms that are too expensive to risk. A Ford-class aircraft carrier costs around $13 billion. A modern weaponized drone costs a few thousand dollars. In a conflict, an adversary does not need to match our budget; they only need to overwhelm our defenses with volume.

We cannot solve this by simply pouring concrete for new shipyards to build old designs. We have to change the unit economics of the vessel itself.

In part 1 of the doctrine we will focus on vessels < 250ft.

To build vessels worthy of a maritime revival, we must first fix the physics. Specifically, the problem of hydrodynamic drag.

Our solution: active hydrofoils.

Hydrofoils aren’t new—navies and programs like the Boeing Foiling Jet proved the physics decades ago. What was missing was the enabling stack: sensors, control systems, computing, and manufacturability to make a reliable flying vessel at scale. Today, low-cost compute, modern sensing, advanced manufacturing and electric/hybrid propulsion finally make hydrofoiling scalable.

Think of hydrofoils as wings operating underwater. In our design, three struts descend from the hull, each ending in wings equipped with adjustable flaps—functioning much like the control surfaces of an airplane. Because water is nearly 1,000 times denser than air, these wings can be significantly smaller than aircraft wings while still generating immense lift.

Once the vessel reaches a certain speed (16 kts for the N30, our first vessel), the wings lift the hull entirely out of the water. This eliminates the friction of the hull pushing through the waves, reducing hydrodynamic drag by up to 90%.

• High speed with dramatically lower energy consumption.

• Radically extended range.

• Smooth “flight” over waves, independent of sea state.

The Efficiency Multiplier The math behind this is compelling. A hydrofoil system reduces drag by 90% compared to a planing hull (a 5-6x hydrodynamic advantage). Simultaneously, an electric drivetrain is 3x more thermally efficient than a combustion engine. When you compound these gains, the result is staggering: An electric hydrofoil operates at roughly 10x the total system efficiency of a gas boat. This isn’t an incremental improvement; it is a platform shift

Autonomy: The Software Layer Autonomy is a worthy problem, but it only works well if the physics work first.

Software retrofits cannot fix bad physics. They only automate inefficiency.

If you automate a traditional boat, you are simply removing the driver from a vehicle that is still too expensive to run and too uncomfortable to ride. Hydrofoils provide the physical foundation; autonomy provides the scalable software layer.

This distinction is critical for unit economics, especially in smaller vessels (<100ft).  A USCG licensed captain costs ~$35–40/hr, whereas an Uber driver costs ~$12/hr. In the current model, operating costs are roughly split 50% fuel and 50% labor.

By solving for drag, we slash energy costs. By solving for autonomy, we slash labor costs. Together, these solutions address both cost and comfort, creating a new class of marine vessels that can open up a whole new transportation network that was never possible before.

We cannot outdo China by playing in their own game: cost and volume. Even robotic factories are not a silver bullet. To win, we must stop playing their game and double down on what America does best: creating compounding leverage through superior technology.

The battle for the next-generation maritime ecosystem will not be won by building bespoke vessels one at a time. It will be won by building scalable platforms—a maritime equivalent to the aerospace “airframe” or the EV “skateboard” chassis.

At Navier, we call this the GMVP (General Maritime Vehicle Platform).

The GMVP is engineered around three non-negotiable criteria:

• Cost Efficiency: Designed to be built, operated, and scaled at a fraction of traditional costs.

• Range at Speed: Pure electric for high-speed coastal missions; hybrid-electric for 8003,500+ nm endurance.

• Seaworthiness: Stability and performance across diverse sea states.

Crucially, the superstructure is secondary. The platform is the constant and you only build a few scalable variants (monohull/catamaran, a few different lengths).  On this single, unified chassis—sharing the same core OS, propulsion, foils, autonomy, and infrastructure—we can deploy:

• Passenger transport

• Autonomous cargo

• Defense craft

• Long-range ISR platforms

• Unmanned Surface Vessels (USVs)

The Dual-Use Advantage Dual-use is not just a buzzword; it is the only way to scale maritime innovation effectively. By producing this platform for commercial markets, we drive down unit costs through volume—something defense budgets alone cannot achieve. This is the power of Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) technology: we lower the cost curve by solving for the mass market first.

This creates a strategic reserve. Non-defense vessels built on this architecture are effectively “pre-certified” hardware. In times of conflict, commercial fleets can be rapidly repurposed, meaning we can surge capacity without waiting years for new keels to be laid.

Asymmetric Leverage This is what “out-innovating” looks like in practice. Because of our hydrofoiling efficiency and long-range hybrid capabilities, a Navier vessel can undertake multiday missions with minimal refueling. This solves the tyranny of distance in theaters like the IndoPacific.

We do not need to match our adversaries hull-for-hull. We can achieve superior coverage with fewer vessels because ours are faster, have better endurance, better ship to ship connectivity and coordination and ability to respond as a coordinated, intelligent swarm. Speed, range, and connectivity coupled with the best allow us to cover more water with less steel.

When we founded Navier during the chaos of COVID, capital had largely abandoned transportation—and maritime along with it. The prevailing belief was that a remote-first world would eliminate the need to move people. That never aligned with reality. Human psychology demands connection, and movement is fundamental to civilization.

The constraints were practical and unforgiving. Public water transit and defense adopt slowly. Scalable electric mobility depends on infrastructure that didn’t yet exist. Waiting years for contracts or grid upgrades while burning capital wasn’t an option. We needed a path that let us prove the physics, generate data, and move fast—on our own terms.

We chose recreational boat market not as an endpoint, but as a strategic wedge because it offers:

Speed of Iteration: Recreation allows us to move at the speed of consumer tech, shipping products while others draft requirements and get thousands of hours of real world data in various sea states. This helped us to design and build the GMVP.

Manufacturing Readiness: While our first two boats were built in Maine, there was no shipyard ready to scale N30 carbon fiber hulls in the US. We used the N30 to figure out how to build carbon fiber hulls in the U.S., bringing production home. All technology development and integration happens in our US factory in Alameda, CA.

A Testbed for Physics: The N30 was a rigorous validation of our core stack: flight control, foil dynamics, and autonomy behaviors, system reliability.

The N30 was the first node in a new maritime network, not the destination.

Impact: A network faster than a taxi and cheaper than a helicopter for the 46% of people living in coastal cities.

2. Island Nations: Decoupling Cost from Geography

• The Problem: The “Island Tax.” Supply chain friction drives costs up 20-40%.

• The Solution: Hybrid-Electric Foiling Logistics.

• The Physics: We combine the efficiency of a barge with the 3x the speed.

Impact: By deploying autonomous, mid-sized vessels, we slash OpEx. We don’t just move goods; we lower the cost of living.

3. Transoceanic: The Mid-Mile Revolution

• The Problem: Global shipping relies on brittle “Megaships” (Pipeline Logistics). One choke point breaks the chain.

• The Solution: “Packet Logistics.” Agile, autonomous, mid-size freight.

Impact: A resilient mesh network that prioritizes frequency over capacity.

4. Defense: Asymmetric Naval Dominance

• The Problem: We cannot out-build China’s shipyards in a symmetrical contest of steel.

• The Solution: Out-innovate, don’t outnumber.

• GMVP Economics: Dual-use technology allows us to deploy Mass without the “Military Price Tag.

Range Revolution: Hybrid drives enable 2,000nm+ range and weeks of silent station-keeping.

We fight Network-to-Hull. A swarm that our adversaries cannot catch, hide from, or starve out.