An Auckland company that builds boats which fly above the water has raised $32.6 million and signed its first customer in the United States, a step that takes a piece of America’s Cup engineering out of the Waitematā and onto one of America’s most closely guarded lakes.
Vessev announced the funding on 20 August, describing it as US$19 million in Series A and follow-on financing. The round was led by Blackbird Ventures, the Australian firm that was an early backer of Canva. New investors GD1 and Rypples joined, alongside existing shareholders K1W1, Icehouse Ventures, Shasta Ventures, NZVC and a group of angel investors. K1W1 was an early investor in Rocket Lab and Icehouse Ventures was an early investor in Halter, so the share register now reads like a roll call of New Zealand’s hardware exporters.
In its announcement the company said the capital will accelerate in-house serial production of its VS–9 vessel line, expand its global sales team, advance its onboard software and telemetry platform, speed up development of larger vessels, and support plans to manufacture in the United States.
The technology is simpler to describe than it is to build. Foils under the hull generate lift, the hull rises clear of the water, and the drag that normally eats most of a boat’s energy disappears. Vessev says its foil systems, inspired by America’s Cup racing designs, adjust to changing conditions up to 100 times a second, and that the result is three times more efficient than a conventional vessel. Because the hull is out of the water there is almost no wake, which matters a great deal on lakes and in harbours where wash damages shorelines and moored boats.
New Zealanders have already been on one. The nine metre VS–9 named Kermadec entered service with Fullers360 in January 2025, running short hydrofoil tours from Auckland’s Viaduct Harbour, and it was the first commercially certified electric hydrofoiling vessel anywhere in the world to join a commercial fleet. Vessev says the boat has now logged more than 11,000 nautical miles. It carries 10 passengers at 25 knots and has a range of up to 40 nautical miles with a full load, or 50 nautical miles lightly loaded.
That same boat has been shipped to the United States. It will make its American debut in New York just before New York Climate Week, then move to the Washington DC Navy Yard on the Potomac in late September for demonstrations run with the DC Mobility Innovation District, before on-water demonstrations at Lake Tahoe later this year.
Lake Tahoe is where the first American order comes from. FlyTahoe, a start-up planning a water transit network across the lake, has bought VS–9 vessels for what it calls America’s first electric flying ferry service. The lake draws more than 15 million visitors a year and there are up to 20,000 vehicle trips a day between the north and south shores, so the pitch is to move people over the water rather than around it.
“This technology unlocks an entirely new era of sustainable water transit – offering a faster alternative to Tahoe’s infamous traffic while helping preserve the lake’s famous clarity,” said FlyTahoe founder and chief executive Ryan Meinzer. “We’re proud to be Vessev’s first U.S. customer and to add the VS–9 to our growing fleet of electric hydrofoiling vessels.”
One caveat sits in the fine print of the announcement, and it is worth reading. FlyTahoe’s proposed network is named in the Lake Tahoe Regional Transportation Plan but remains subject to Tahoe Regional Planning Agency permits and approvals that the company is still working to obtain. Lake Tahoe’s clarity is protected by one of the more demanding planning regimes in the United States. The boats are sold, but the service is not yet consented.
Vessev co-founder and chief executive Eric Laakmann said hydrofoiling “doesn’t just make boats better, it redefines what’s possible on water”. He said the company was “making vessels significantly more efficient, better for passengers and more scalable for operators”, and that Lake Tahoe was an ideal place to demonstrate the technology.
Blackbird partner Phoebe Harrop Meadows said Vessev “is bringing world-class engineering from Apple, Tesla, the America’s Cup and Rocket Lab to a massive, long-stagnant industry”, and that the combination of foiling and software “unlocks lower operating costs while improving the passenger experience”.
For a New Zealand manufacturer the interesting line is the last one on the list of uses for the money. Vessev says it plans to work with United States-based shipbuilders while continuing to design, engineer and build its core technology in-house, including the foils, hardware and flight control systems. In other words the hulls may eventually be assembled closer to the customer while the valuable engineering stays in Auckland. That is a familiar shape for exporters selling large, expensive objects into a market with freight costs, tariffs and local content politics, and it is the point at which growth stories either keep adding New Zealand jobs or stop adding them.
For now the work is here. Vessev employs 58 people in Auckland, its production is booked out for about two years, and it wants to be turning out a vessel every five weeks by 2027. Laakmann told RNZ the company has “orders on four different continents” and that most of its customers are fleet operators. He said smaller, more agile vessels changed what an operator could do, because “you have more point-to-point transfers and you’re not relying on larger vessels”.
Other orders are in train. A vessel is being built for Taupō Hydrofoil Tours, projects are underway in Sydney, Hobart and Perth with first Australian deliveries expected next year, and a VS–9 is destined for a lakeside resort in Northern Ireland.
The wider industry it sits in is bigger than most people assume. Figures published by Boating New Zealand in May, drawn from the NZ Marine Industry Association and the ICOMIA yearbook, count 1,104 marine companies in New Zealand employing 5,451 people, including 149 boat builders with 2,202 staff between them. It is an industry built on exporting a small number of high value boats, which is exactly the market Vessev is trying to move into with a product that is sold on running costs rather than on craftsmanship alone.
The things to watch from here are whether FlyTahoe clears its permits, whether the Auckland factory can lift its build rate without losing the certification advantage it has, and how much of the manufacturing stays on this side of the Pacific once American demand arrives.
What do you make of a New Zealand company exporting its boat technology to the United States, and should more of the building stay here? Leave a comment below and tell us what you think.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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