If you’ve ever spent time writing beat poetry about container ships chugging their way into and out of harbors, “nimble” or “fast” will be unlikely to make it into your finely crafted written words. And if your (admittedly increasingly esoteric) poetic bent is more of an air freight persuasion, it’s likely that “affordable” was not in your lexicon. Boundary Layer is working on a series of electrically propulsed hydrofoiling vessels and wants to rewrite the book of transportation-focused verse, one stanza at a time, with nimble, fast-to-load, container-ship standard high-speed shipping vessels, with the goal of halving the cost of traditional air freight, at comparable speeds.
The company raised $4.8 million from Lower Carbon Capital, Fifty Years and Soma Capital, and already has $90 million in pre-orders from ferry operators for their 220-seat electric passenger vessels. The passenger ships are but a launchpad before the company goes after its real goal: the freight market. I spoke with Boundary Layer’s CEO and founder, Ed Kearney, who told me that these early vessels are a launchpad to enter the $100 billion air freight market with a high-speed hydrogen-powered container ship.
“We applied to Y Combinator and were accepted. We told the partners in the interview that if we were accepted into Y Combinator, we would come to the Bay Area, and we’d build a hydrofoil container ship that carries one container,” says Kearney. The Y Combinator team called bullshit, he tells me. The team rolled up their sleeves and got to work. “We turned up with some hand tools in our luggage, no workshop, nowhere to live, and started building. Ten weeks later, we managed to build this hydrofoil. We spent $150,000 on it, which happened to be exactly the amount of money that YC gives you. We parked out in front of the demo day facility and it made a bit of an impact.”
It’s easy to see how; the company’s prototype ship — and the video it produced to show it off — looks pretty slick:
The challenge with hydrofoiling, of course, is that you need a fair bit of energy to get the ship’s hull out of the water — and that’s harder the heavier the ship gets. The world’s largest cargo ships can transport some 24,000 containers in one go. Needless to say, those behemoths aren’t going to casually lift their hulls out of the water — but that’s also not what the company is competing with.
“The physics [of hydrofoiling] is very similar to that of an aircraft. The amount of the lift-to-drag ratio that you get with modern materials on a hydrofoil wing these days are about the same as what you can get from a traditional airplane. So the amount of power you need to make a vehicle have the same amount of mass takeoff is also kind of comparable. Also the amount of thrust you need scales with speed,” Kearney explains. “An aircraft travels at 500 knots …read more