SAMPRITI BHATTACHARYYA THINKS BIG. At her startup Navier, she’s redefining maritime transportation through electric hydrofoiling vessels and a broader platform vision, where the ocean is the next frontier.
“I wanted to solve hard problems,” she said. “Problems that, if solved, could fundamentally change how the world works.”
The core question was fundamental: What does it cost to move through water, and how fast can it happen?
“If you think of first principles, what matters is the cost and speed at which you move per unit mile per unit payload through a medium,” she said. “If you can make a dent in the cost and speed at which you move things and people, you fundamentally change the economics of the world, but also the access to the ocean.”
The mission to build compelling zero-emission vessels that reduce operating costs and open a new era of clean, scalable water transportation manifests in Navier’s N30 Pioneer Edition.
But her starting point was never simply to make an electric boat. It was to build the most compelling vessel they could. She believes in building systems that do the least harm to the planet, but that doesn’t mean ignoring physics, performance, or operational realities.
“The beautiful thing about the N30 Pioneer is that sustainability and profitability go hand in hand,” she said. The electric hydrofoil design makes the boat cheaper to operate while also making it quieter and more comfortable at sea.
Delivering that first Navier vessel and bringing such a complex machine into production is one of her proudest achievements, she said. Maritime and vehicle factories remain industries with limited female representation, and she doesn’t quite “fit the mold.” But she hopes it could inspire other women to strive for similar.
“There’s not a lot of women building ships and boats and running factories, and especially Indian women with an accent,” she said, adding that she would love to have more women engineers apply for Navier positions.
She’s not complaining, though. “I chose this path. I chose to build this company. I didn’t have to,” she said. Much like a video game, she treats it as part of the level she’s on: “You could just play at level two, and it’s easy and you keep winning and repeating that. But where’s the fun?”
“I find fun in challenges. This is maybe the way I look at the world—whenever things are very difficult and hard, I realize that I chose this path. I chose to build this company. I didn’t have to.”
—Sampriti Bhattacharyya, CEO and Founder, Navier
Bhattacharyya said Elon Musk is one of the builders she most respects, and he has been on Navier’s boat and even driven one. “He’s a fascinating person, and I really respect his way of thinking,” she said.
Transformational Engineering
Her early aspirations were not to lead a company per se, but to create impact at scale. Building a company was the best way to ensure that technology would not remain at the lab but could make it into products and services, she said.
Growing up in India, the expectation around engineering was to “get a degree and work for offshore IT companies,” she said. But the best advice she received was that hard problems were worth solving, and not to be afraid of them.
Bhattacharyya credits Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series and Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time for sparking her interest in technology and engineering around age 12. A few years later, after her family got cable TV, she remembers watching programs about the Apollo Moon missions and Mars.
“The idea that you can build things and literally go for the Moon—it was fascinating to me,” she said. “Somewhere in another country on the other side of the world, people were building this.”
At 20 years old, Bhattacharyya bravely packed her bags, boarded her first ever flight, and left India for an internship in the U.S., where she did not know anyone or have any connections. “I grew up in a culture where it was fairly conservative, where I had not had that kind of exposure,” she said. “I just decided to go for the unknown."
Many milestones followed from there. Working an internship at NASA was such a fulfilling life dream that she remembers crying when it happened. She holds multiple engineering degrees and has worked across high-energy physics, mechanical engineering specialized in underwater robotics, and nuclear reactor design.
“When you understand the underlying physics and math, you connect the dots across all engineering,” she said.
If she could run multiple companies at once, she would revisit some of those past lives. Nuclear energy and bionics are projects near and dear to her. Bhattacharyya designed an accelerator-driven subcritical reactor in the past and still thinks deeply about how bionics could integrate more seamlessly with the body.
But for now, leading Navier is more than ambitious enough.
“I think transforming 70 percent of the world’s final frontier with an ecosystem of connected overwater and underwater vessels is pretty ambitious as it gets,” she said. Her vision is an entire ecosystem to transform the oceans: vessels, software, data infrastructure, and energy infrastructure.
“We’re building a generational maritime company that powers everything that moves through the water,” she said.
Navier is hiring engineers. See the company’s Careers page for current openings.
Sarah Alburakeh is strategic content editor.
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