Arc

Every year, about 12 million recreational boats travel through America’s streams, spewing foul emissions, gasoline sheens, and screaming noises from engines in their wake. Several firms are already working to expand the electric vehicle trend that is currently sweeping across streets globally into rivers, lakes, and coastal seas.

One of the more recent entries in the expanding marketplace for battery-operated boats is Arc Boat Company. The Los Angeles-based business, whose group comprises former engineers from Tesla and SpaceX, was founded in 2021 with the goal of electrifying the sector, beginning with the creation of an expensive luxury powerboat.

The business announced on Wednesday that a seventy-million-dollar Series B investment round had been completed, increasing its total capital to over 100 million dollars. The current venture capital investors in Arc, including Menlo Ventures, Lowercarbon Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and Abstract Ventures, participated in the round.

“Gas boats are noisy, they’re noxious, they are super-unreliable,” Mitch Lee, Arc’s CEO and co-founder, told Canary Media. “Electric boats solve a lot of those pain points. But the hard part is execution of the technology.”

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Arc intends to use its new investment to develop and produce wakeboarding speed boats from a new facility in Torrance, in the state of California, to appeal to a larger, though still somewhat wealthy, marketplace of recreational boaters. Within the span of 18 months, the firm hopes to double its employment to about 140, according to Lee.

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Just one percent of the nation’s yearly carbon dioxide emissions from gasoline-powered vehicles come from recreational boat engines. They have an even more immediate negative effect on the ecosystem because they release airborne pollutants that cause smog and leak gasoline. Recreational boats can nevertheless be excellent initial prospects for creating the zero-emissions technology required to clean up bigger, long-distance boats, according to transportation professionals, even if they have far fewer energy requirements than, for example, a high-powered fishing boat or a cargo ship.

“It’s really hard to package enough power into a boat to be directly competitive with existing gas options,” Lee said. “It’s a testament to our team that we’ve delivered these [Arc One] boats on an incredibly fast timeline” while working toward the next phase of the company’s journey, he added.

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