In the Room with Sampriti Bhattacharyya, CEO and Founder of Navier
In this week’s episode of The Room Podcast, we were joined by Sampriti Bhattacharyya, the CEO and Founder of Navier, an electric boat startup that aims to revolutionize maritime transportation and make waterways as accessible as highways. Navier recently launched Navier 30, America’s first all-electric hydrofoil boat, and is working to scale production to transform the waterways with eco-friendly boats that provide unparalleled speed and comfort.
Growing up in India, Sampriti was removed from the startup ecosystem, but she was surrounded by a culture of creativity and aspired to become an inventor. Initially, Sampriti thought she wanted to be an aerospace engineer, and she completed her undergraduate degree at West Bengal University before coming to the U.S. to pursue a master’s degree in aerospace engineering at Ohio State University.
However, it was Sampriti’s time at MIT pursuing a PhD in mechanical engineering that inspired her to start Navier. While at MIT, Sampriti was working on underwater drones, and when news surfaced that Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 had disappeared, she was shocked at the world’s inability to find a massive plane in the ocean. She realized that there was a lack of deep-sea technology and saw a huge opportunity to build the next-generation maritime company. This led her to found her first company, Hydroswarm, an underwater drone startup. Due to IP and visa complications, Hydroswarm closed down after a few years, but Sampriti was confident in her thesis and decided to try again. This time she focused on the boating industry; thus, Navier was born. Since its launch in 2020, Navier has received funding from investors including Next View Ventures and Liquid2 Ventures, and Sergey Brin, the founder of Google.
In today’s episode, we discuss three key themes: the power of persistence that doesn’t defy physics, overcoming bias in the deep tech sector, and the future of maritime transportation.
Listen to our episode with Sampriti on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.
Key Theme 1: The Power of Persistence That Doesn’t Defy Physics
Sampriti’s path to becoming a founder was anything but a straight line. In India, she did not attend a top university and, as a result, had limited professional opportunities. However, she heard about U.S. internships from a friend who attended a top school in India and was intrigued. Despite receiving no responses after emailing 260 people, Sampriti remained focused and persistent, thinking that “from the physics of it, it must not be impossible, there must be a path.” After sending 540 emails, “there were four replies, two interviews, and one worked out”. She had secured an internship at the Department of Energy, which set her on the path to success as an inventor in the US.
While many people give up in the face of adversity and unlikely odds, Sampriti demonstrates extraordinary perseverance rooted in her trust in physics. Her unwavering persistence and inspiring outcomes serves as a lesson to all of us pursuing our passions.
Key Theme 2: Overcoming Bias in the Deep Tech Sector
As a brown woman with an accent, Sampriti faced difficulties bringing Navier’s innovative technology to market. She notes that “people don’t see you as the most likely person who might be building something crazy wild or something that is likely to be successful,” and, as a woman, “even if you’re educated, you often might get discounted.” Sampriti believes that overcoming bias in the deep tech sector requires a community effort, and she “wants to see more women on my cap table” and “it would be cool to see more women investors who are also getting comfortable with investing in women who are doing hard tech and not shying away from that”.
Sampriti’s success as an underrepresented woman in deep tech aligns with the Room’s goal of bringing female or underrepresented founders into the room to share their powerful stories. If everyone contributes to the cause, we can move towards more diverse and inclusive representation in the tech industry.
Key Theme 3: The future of maritime transportation
Sampriti envisions the future of maritime transportation as autonomous, and Navier is already leading the game. The Navier 30 is the first boat in the industry with an autonomous navigation autopilot system and a one-click auto-docking feature. For Sampriti, full autonomy is the ultimate goal, as it would make water taxis scalable and cost-competitive. She is optimistic that autonomous boats may even come before autonomous cars.
Sampriti also believes that “generative AI is going to open a huge realm of possibilities, especially in terms of training data, which is a big issue for when you’re doing autonomy” With generative AI, you can generate more synthetic data and this can allow you “to mimic more real world scenarios and develop better simulations”. This leads to lower costs and faster progress towards autonomy.
Navier’s sustainable boats offer outstanding performance and utility, and they are spearheading the future of maritime transportation. Given that oceans make up 70% of the world’s real estate and 46% of the world’s population live in congested coastal cities, we are excited to see how Navier will continue to disrupt waterborne transportation.
Thank you for tuning in to this episode of The Room Podcast! We hope you enjoyed learning about Sampriti Bhattacharyya’s journey in founding Navier.
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