By Sara Miller, NoCamels -
Humans have been transporting themselves and their possessions across water for millennia, and there are even signs that our now extinct hominin ancestors were building boats more than half a million years ago.
And while some boat styles fall out of favor, never to be heard of again, one Israeli startup is giving an old boat a renaissance with new technology to bring it into the modern day.
Level Hydrofoils, as the name suggests, has adapted the traditional hydrofoil to make it more stable, versatile for individual users and potentially even a form of mass transportation.
Hydrofoils operate through a similar principle to airplane wings, using the speed of the craft to lift it up and propel it forwards – giving the user a sense of flying through the air rather than moving through water.
And because it is not forcing its way through the water, instead balancing on a slim blade attached to a submerged rudder, it is faster and expends less energy than traditional boats.
“It’s extremely efficient,” Level CEO Arthur Yanai tells NoCamels. “It is able to reduce up to 80 percent of the energy consumption of a given vessel.”
But what makes the hydrofoil so energy efficient is also what made it so hard to operate and one of the main reasons for their lack of popularity – staying afloat on the surfboard-like top as it rests on that narrow blade takes skill and a great deal of practice.
“It’s like balancing a broomstick on the palm of your hand,” says Yanai, a captain in the Israeli Navy reserves. “You would have to drink a lot of sea water until you were able to fly.”
Level’s proprietary technology has removed that perilous training period, using a built-in gyroscope stabilization system to instantaneously adjust and balance electric-powered hydrofoils, known as e-foils, as they move.
The gyroscope is embedded into the e-foil base and functions at 100 hertz (actions per second), Yanai explains, making it three times faster than highly trained sports people who rely on their quick responses, such as racing drivers.
“In the battle here between the human and machine, the machine has won,” he says. “The machine can do a much better job of stabilizing than a human being.”
This technology makes the e-foil so stable that Yanai claims it takes the average person just a few moments to master and can even safely transport a dog.
“With our self-stabilization system, we are able to make this entire learning curve as simple as a click of a button,” he says.
The user simply pushes the takeoff button on the deck of the board and the e-foil begins to move forward, lifting itself out of the water while remaining stable at all times.
“You might fall every now and again, but you will be successful and in control in an extremely short period of time,” according to Yanai.
The craft comes with an app that can let the user determine how fast they go can and even let the more experienced turn off the gyro for a regular e-foil flight.
Yanai envisions fleets of the Level e-foil being used to escort travelers to waterbound areas of interest, not dissimilar to the popular city tours using two-wheeled Segways that also require a short lesson to master.
This would also be a singular experience, he says, as e-foil operators today only offer lessons and not group expeditions with family and friends.
“Imagine yourself on a lake in Italy and meeting a fleet of them, or a beautiful island in Greece, a lagoon in the Bahamas,” he says.
The watercraft has a top speed of about 35 kilometers per hour and a range of about 30 to 40 kilometers. But, says Yanai, more intrepid travelers could carry a spare battery or two on board and easily change them even in the water – another original feature.
Level is a portfolio company at IN-VENTech, Haifa Municipality’s startup program, a support framework for local innovation that partners with the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa Port and AWS, among others.
The company has already passed its proof of concept milestone, and now has a fleet of four prototypes that it is now demonstrating to interested parties in Israel and Europe.
The final hurdle, he explains, is to fully commercialize the e-foils and begin mass production. This requires a fresh round of funding to finance the manufacturing process, which will see the e-foil components being made in the Far East and then assembled in Israel.
Each Level e-foil currently costs approximately $14,000, but despite the price tag, Yanai says the startup is already taking pre-orders from a “select group” of clients, ready for delivery next year.
“We have built the safest hydrofoil surfboard in the world,” Yanai says, “and that’s completely unique.”
