A helm for a fully electric boat

The challenge

Our client, a startup building a fully electric boat prototype, needed a complete boat helm — navigation, maps, boat analytics and deep integration with the vessel's hardware — developed in a record timeline. The next funding round was the deadline, and the demo had to work on the water, not in a slide.

What we did

We built the helm end to end. Navigation and charts ran on a marine-grade stack, wired straight into the boat's systems over CAN bus and NMEA, with a live analytics layer surfacing battery, propulsion and position at a glance. We prototyped fast, tested against real hardware early, and kept the interface simple enough to trust at the wheel.

The lab moved at the speed of the idea: AI carried the heavy lifting on research and iteration, so the team could spend its hours on the parts only humans get right — the feel of the helm and the reliability of the integration.

The outcome

Just in time for the next funding round, we delivered the first prototype and demonstrated it successfully in Spain. The helm ran on real hardware, on a real boat — proof that the idea was not only possible, but shippable.