Inc. Magazine on REGENT's unique business strategy

Inc Senior Editor Rob Verger takes a deep dive into REGENT's unique approach to seaglider innovation, business strategy, and certification.

Read the Inc. article here.

By Rob Verger, Senior Editor, Inc.

A decade. A billion dollars. Those sky-high figures refer to the inputs generally necessary to get a new aircraft certified by the Federal Aviation Administration. But what if you don’t have that kind of money or time? Build a boat—or more specifically, a flying boat—instead.

That’s precisely what Billy Thalheimer and Mike Klinker have done. In 2020, the MIT-trained engineers founded Regent, a North Kingstown, Rhode Island-based aerospace company that makes a flying boat called a seaglider. The invention, which Thalheimer likens to a “new mode of transportation,” has the power to transform transportation and may even hold implications for cargo shipments, the military, and trade more generally, says Thalheimer.

Mark Cuban agrees. “It’s a revolutionary product that can change transportation for so many cities. Faster, better, cheaper is always a winning combination,” says Cuban, who participated in the company’s $60 million series A round in 2023.

Taking Flight

But Regent needs to get its seaglider certified first. Because of its status as a boat—technically, it’s a “wing-in-ground craft”—certification of the vessel falls to the U.S. Coast Guard and not the FAA, where the regulatory pathway for aircraft is freighted with delays and layers of bureaucracy.

Kali Hague is familiar with the finer points of the process. The COO of aviation law firm Jetlaw also mentions the billion-dollar figure when it comes to certifying a new kind of aircraft. “The industry saying is, if you don’t have a billion dollars, then don’t try,” she notes. “It’s a huge undertaking.” What’s more, certifying a new type of business jet, for example, is likely to be a faster path than trying to certify something with a radically new design, like the electric air taxis that companies like Joby and Archer want to eventually operate.

Instead, by creating a craft that would get its certification through the Coast Guard, Regent is hoping to bring its seagliders to market faster and for less money than it would take for the FAA to certify a totally new kind of aircraft.

Why go this route? Ted Lester had a hunch. Regent’s vice president for certification notes that the Coast Guard has never certified a vessel like the seaglider before. But he thinks the U.S.’s maritime regulator may be more open to the concept because of how varied the designs of boats and ships are compared to aircraft, which have a pretty homogeneous appearance (a tube for passengers to sit in and wings). “I like to say the FAA has a lot of bureaucratic inertia as it relates to aircraft design,” Lester says. “The maritime world doesn’t quite have that same level of bureaucratic inertia.”

Regent’s seagliders are indeed different. The full-size prototype, which is now being tested at sea, sports a wingspan of 65 feet and boasts a whopping dozen propellers. It’s all electric. In a typical setup, two operators sit up front, with 12 passengers behind them. A video the company released shows the vessel cruising across the waves. While it hasn’t flown yet, if and when it does, it will stay close to the water below, making use of the cushion of air that naturally forms when a flying machine is close to the surface—like the smooth, gentle feeling you might detect right before a plane lands.

It also has another trick up its sleeve: Before it actually starts flying, it first raises out of the water on hydrofoils, the way some America’s Cup boats do. “Float, foil, fly is what seagliders do,” Thalheimer says.

Another thing they will do: go very, very fast. The seagliders will fly at 180 miles per hour. For comparison, an electric ferry in Sweden called the Candela P-12 also makes use of hydrofoils but doesn’t actually totally take flight. Its speed is around 30 mph.

And the ocean is a great place for rapid transportation, says John Gutoff, an expert in maritime law and professor of law at Roger Williams Law School in Bristol, Rhode Island. He describes overwater travel as “really efficient for a whole bunch of reasons.” One reason is that the terrain—water—is “perfectly flat.”

“You can go in relatively straight lines, as long as it’s over water,” he says. “And I think for the East Coast, this seems like a great commuting idea.”

That is Regent’s eventual goal: Should everything go according to plan, passengers should be able to start booking trips on a seaglider starting in 2027—a trip from New York City to the Hamptons may cost $80. The company won’t operate the machines; it will sell them to transportation companies. Thalheimer thinks they can get to market for around $200 million to $300 million—far less than the $1 billion or so it might take to certify a novel aircraft. Investors like Cuban like the sound of that. So far, Regent, which was a 2021 Y Combinator alum, has raised over $100 million and employs 101 people.

For orders, the company boasts “$10 billion in backlog,” Thalheimer says. “That’s a combination of airlines, ferry companies, energy companies, be it offshore wind or oil and gas. We have hotels, we have tourism operations.” While some of those orders are firm and some provisional, one in the first group is Miami-based UrbanLink, which plans to purchase 27 seagliders.

An Ocean of Possibility

Regent’s progress to this point is a testament to its founders’ ability to see around obstacles. While Thalheimer and Klinker first met as undergraduates at MIT, they worked together at Aurora Flight Sciences, a Cambridge, Massachusetts aerospace company acquired by Boeing in 2017. At Aurora, Thalheimer worked on a small electric flying machine called the PAV, or Personal Air Vehicle. (Klinker was focused on defense programs.) That’s where they first learned how difficult it was to get a new aircraft certified by the FAA.

Thalheimer says that he and Klinker realized then that they were probably “a decade too soon,” with what they were trying to do at Aurora—using new kinds of electric aircraft to transport passengers just seemed too far off. “The cost and duration of an FAA certification program—[it’s] a decade, a billion dollars,” he says.

Another issue, Thalheimer notes, is that running an aircraft on electric power doesn’t offer travelers a very long range. Regular aircraft, whether they are powered by traditional fuel or batteries, need to keep a certain level of reserve in the tank (or batteries) to make it to an alternate airport in the event of a glitch.  Seagliders are different. “If you’re flying over the water surface, where you always have a safe place to land, we can basically use that full battery range capacity to get to our destination,” Klinker says. They estimate that their seagliders will have a range of 180 miles off one charge.

Ultimately, Thalheimer and Klinker see an ocean of possibility, despite the challenges. “Our market is larger than $500 billion when you consider commercial applications, passenger, cargo, the offshore, the defense applications,” Thalheimer says. “Ninety percent of cargo today goes on the ocean, so why are we not leveraging that free transportation infrastructure?”

Read the Inc. article here.