Startups transforming pleasure boating draw investor interest

[NEW YORK] "This is one of those pretty obvious ideas," says co-founder and CEO Mitch Lee of his year-old startup's work on electrifying pleasure boats. Arc Boat's first design, a pre-production model named the Arc One, recently hit the water for a day of testing.

Lee travelled with the team building the vessel to Lake Arrowhead, about an hour-and-a-half east of Los Angeles, Arc's home base. The lake run along with other testing last fall and this winter have informed a handful of specification changes - "in a good way", according to Arc - from those we reported on in November. The 200 kWh battery size, for example, has increased by 10 per cent, nearly 3 times the capacity of a Tesla Model Y.

• $300k The price for the Arc One, roughly 50 per cent more than a comparable gas-powered vessel
• <20 Arc's initial production run; all are spoken for and the waiting list continues to grow

1. Most marinas are wired to provide electricity to yachts and other marine machines.

2. Keeping Arc One's 220kWh power pack from overheating isn't hard, since the vehicle is perpetually surrounded by cooling fluid.

3. "A lot of people just naturally assume that boats are similar to cars and planes and that they take a ton of time to bring to market," says Lee. But the regulatory hurdles for new vessels are few, relative to the ones highway-bound vehicles have to negotiate.

• $30m Arc's latest investment round, led by Eclipse Ventures, which has also invested in electric aircraft
• 3 to 5 hours Time the Arc One can run on a single charge-roughly a day of pleasure boating

What's Next

The limited edition e-boat will start shipping to customers this summer. It comes at a time when other electric boats are also hitting the market, from Swedish startup X Shore and Nautique Boat. The bigger challenge, says Lee, will be to figure out how to produce thousands. "We deeply understand that that is the most challenging aspect; this industry right now is supply constrained. So how quickly can we produce a lot of these electric boats?" BLOOMBERG