From sky to sea: How 20 years of drone engineering built the world's first high- performance electric hydrofoiling boat

People often assume ENVGO is a boat company that decided to add some autonomy on top. It's the other way around. ENVGO was founded by a team of engineers who spent close to two decades building unmanned aerial systems, commonly known as drones, before they ever turned their attention to water. NV1, the world's first performance-class electric hydrofoiling boat, isn't a marine product with drone tech bolted on. It's a flight control problem that happens to operate on the surface of the water instead of in the sky.

That sounds like a stretch until you look at the physics.

The Real Problem With Conventional Boats

Conventional boats are just what they've always been, and that's exactly the problem. Push the throttle on a displacement hull and it does what it's always done: plow forward, sluggish and predictable, nose punching into every wave it meets. The hull stays in contact with the water at all times, which keeps it stable, but that constant contact is also what makes the experience so punishing. At speed, you're not gliding; you're pounding. Every wave is an impact. Water comes over the bow. The ride is loud, wet, and jarring in a way that has simply been accepted as the price of going fast on the water.

Fixed-wing aircraft and highway cars have the same profile: inherently stable platforms that stay in full contact with their medium. And full contact at speed means drag, resistance, and for anyone on board a fast boat a ride that beats you up. And a ride that also smells of fuel fumes and erodes our coastlines.

Hydrofoiling changes the equation entirely. Lift the hull out of the water onto a set of underwater foils and the waves that were hammering the boat now pass harmlessly underneath it. No pounding, no spray, near-silence. The hull flies above the chop, and the experience transforms: smooth, fast, and completely unlike anything a conventional boat can offer at speed. The catch is that a hull flying above the water needs to be very stable. And solving that stability challenge is where two decades of drone engineering comes in.

Why Hydrofoiling Boats Need Drone-Grade Flight Control

Quadrotor drones took a deliberate approach to instability: rather than relying on passive physical stability, they introduced instability and solved it with software. Lift a quadrotor off the ground and, left alone, it will flip over in a fraction of a second. The only thing keeping it upright is a flight controller making thousands of small corrections every second, reading data from an inertial measurement unit (IMU) dozens of times faster than a human could react, and adjusting four motors in concert to hold the craft level. Take away the controller and you lose that capability. But with the controller running, the result is a vehicle that absorbs turbulence invisibly and moves with a smoothness no inherently stable platform can match.

A hydrofoiling boat is the same trade-off. Lift the hull up out of the water onto a set of thin foils and you've removed the displacement and the wetted surface that made the old boat predictable — but you've also removed all that pounding, all that drag, all that noise. What's left is a vessel balanced on blades a few inches wide, at speed, on a surface that is never flat for more than a second. You need continuous, high-frequency correction for a foiling boat to be stable.

As ENVGO CEO Mike Peasgood has put it bluntly: "It's not a marine design challenge. It's an aerospace design challenge."

That single observation is the foundation the company is built on.

How Two Decades of UAS Engineering Power ENVGO’s hydrofoil vessels

Once you frame a foiling boat as a flight vehicle, the engineering path looks familiar to anyone who has spent a career building drones. ENVGO’s vessels run self-stabilizing avionics making more than 50 automated foil adjustments per second — the same order of magnitude as the flight controllers ENVGO's team built for unmanned aircraft at their previous company, used in defence and public safety operations around the world. It fuses IMU data with GPS for position and heading, exactly as a UAS does. It uses radar to continuously measure hull height above the water surface, the equivalent of a drone's altitude hold. It reads water depth with sonar before the boat gets there, the way a UAS reads terrain. And it processes a six-camera vision array through an onboard GPU to identify obstacles, other vessels, and shoreline, and to plan a path around them, the same sensor fusion and perception stack that matured over fifteen years of UAS development for real-time, safety-critical missions.

The result speaks for itself: ENVGO’s showcase vessel NV1 flies at up to 80 km/h, travels up to 100 km on a single charge, is capable of delivering 330 hp of power, and achieves up to four times the efficiency of conventional electric propulsion because a hull flying above the water faces a fundamentally different drag equation. The flight controller is what makes it possible.

None of this is coincidence. Several members of the ENVGO team spent their careers writing flight control software, building vision and AI systems, and architecting the sensor stacks for unmanned aircraft. They weren't starting from zero. They were porting two decades of solved problems in real-time control and autonomy into a new fluid and building the AI-native platform that will power the next generation of autonomous marine vessels.

What Makes Building for Water Harder Than Building for Air

In comparison to air, water offers some unique challenges that the team found and solved for during early prototyping. Air doesn't cavitate. Water does. Push a foil too fast at the wrong angle and the pressure drop on its surface causes the water to literally boil into vapor bubbles, collapsing lift instantaneously: a failure mode with no equivalent in aerospace, engineered around foil by foil, iteration by iteration.

There's a second, more subtle difference. Cars are kinematic: point the wheels somewhere and the vehicle goes there. Boats are dynamic systems - they slide, drift, and respond to forces (wind, wake, current) that have nothing to do with where the helm is pointed. A fast-moving vessel on unpredictable water behaves more like an unstable aircraft fighting gusts than a car on a road. It's a harder control problem than most people assume, and exactly the kind of problem this team has spent its career solving, previously at altitude, now at the waterline.

From Aeryon Labs to ENVGO: A $200M Exit and a New Mission

This isn't ENVGO's first vehicle that needed aerospace flight controls. Before ENVGO, this same core team built Aeryon Labs, founded in Waterloo, Ontario in 2007. Aeryon's unmanned aerial systems were deployed by defence forces, police services, and emergency response agencies across more than 35 markets worldwide, trusted by 20 militaries including the US Department of Defense, and by police services across Canada for everything from missing persons searches to disaster relief operations. The company became one of Canada's most recognized names in autonomous aviation, and in January 2019, Aeryon Labs was acquired by FLIR Systems for approximately $200 million USD — the largest VC-backed defence startup exit in Canada to this day.

After the sale, rather than scattering to new companies, part of the core team stayed together. In 2021, they founded ENVGO with a clear thesis: the hardest problems in autonomous mobility had already been solved once, in the air: the marine industry, which had seen comparatively little of that investment and R&D, was the next place those solutions belonged. The company's first hydrofoiling proof-of-concept was a three-foot model built to prove the fundamentals. It grew into a twelve-foot single-seat prototype where the team built the entire technology stack from helm to propeller. And that led to NV1 Founders Edition — now backed by investors including Two Small Fish Ventures, Garage Capital, and SDTC.

Those same proven fundamentals, the control architecture, the sensor stack, the autonomy software, are now the foundation for ENVGO's expansion into defence and public safety, where XV2, a sub 2-metre micro-USV, is being developed for Canadian sovereign defence requirements.

The Future of Electric Marine Technology: Drone Boats, Defence, and a Cleaner Ocean

ENVGO is sometimes described as building "drone boats," and that label is more literal than it sounds. ENVGO’s vessels are engineered by the same core team that built unmanned aircraft for Aeryon Labs flown by militaries and emergency responders on five continents, applying everything they'd learned about flight control and sensor fusion to a new domain.

And these vessels do all of this while being 100% electric: zero emissions, near-silent at speed, and wake-free, protecting the natural soundscape and shoreline ecosystems that make being on the water worth it in the first place.

That continuity across sky and sea is not a marketing angle. It is the literal engineering history of the company, and it is the reason ENVGO didn't have to start from scratch to rethink boat design from the keel up. They'd already spent twenty years learning how to keep something stable when physics doesn't want it to be. They just had to teach it to swim.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is an electric hydrofoiling boat?

An electric hydrofoiling boat uses underwater wings (foils) to lift the hull above the water's surface at speed, eliminating wave impact and drag. Because the hull is no longer in contact with the water, the ride is smooth, fast, and near-silent. The ENVGO NV1 is the world's first performance-class electric hydrofoiling boat, reaching speeds of up to 80 kph with a 100 km range on a single charge.

How does a hydrofoiling boat stay stable at high speed?

A hydrofoiling boat cannot rely on hull contact with the water for stability — once the hull lifts, that stability disappears. Instead, it uses an active flight control system that makes continuous, high-frequency corrections to keep the vessel level. ENVGO's NV1 makes 50 automated foil adjustments per second, using data from an IMU, GPS, radar, sonar, and a six-camera vision array, the same approach used in drone flight controllers.

What is the connection between drone technology and the ENVGO NV1?

ENVGO's founding team spent close to two decades building unmanned aerial systems (UAS) at Aeryon Labs before founding ENVGO. The same flight control principles, sensor fusion architecture, and autonomy software that keep drones stable in the air now keep NV1 stable on the water. ENVGO's CEO Mike Peasgood describes hydrofoiling as "an aerospace design challenge, not a marine one."

How fast does the ENVGO NV1 go, and what is its range?

The ENVGO NV1 reaches speeds of up to 80 km/h, capable of 330 hp of power, and travels up to 100 km on a single charge. It delivers up to four times the efficiency of conventional electric boat propulsion, a result of the hull flying above the water rather than plowing through it.

What is the difference between a UAS and a USV?

A UAS (Unmanned Aerial System) operates in the air, commonly known as a drone. A USV (Unmanned Surface Vessel) operates on the water's surface, sometimes called a drone boat. ENVGO builds both recreational and defence-oriented USVs using the same engineering principles developed over nearly two decades of UAS work at Aeryon Labs.

Who founded ENVGO, and what is their background?

ENVGO was founded in 2021 by six co-founders who all previously built Aeryon Labs together: CEO Mike Peasgood, CTO Mike Tribou, Principal AI Systems Architect April Blaylock, COO Paul Masojc, VP Sales & BD Pete Keller, and VP Engineering Jerry Mailloux. Aeryon Labs was acquired by FLIR Systems in 2019 for $200 million USD, the largest VC-backed defence startup exit in Canada to this day.

What is ENVGO building for defence?

In 2026, ENVGO expanded into defence and public safety with its Unmanned Surface Vessel, XV2, a 2-metre micro-USV being developed for Canadian sovereign defence requirements. The XV2 builds on the autonomous control technology proven in NV1, and draws on the team's experience deploying UAS systems across 35+ markets for 20 militaries worldwide at Aeryon Labs.

Is ENVGO’s NV1 environmentally friendly?

Yes. NV1 is 100% electric with zero direct emissions. Because it flies above the water rather than displacing it, it generates minimal wake (reducing shoreline erosion and protecting aquatic ecosystems) and operates near-silently, reducing noise impact on marine life and waterfront communities.