Lo's at it. One early Thursday morning in June, the Mayor of Paris got up at dawn and made her way to the River Sin. That's not usually part of her morning routine, but two inventors, a sailor and a windsurfing champion, convinced her to take a ride on a new kind of taxi. They're calling it a sea bubble zero emissions boat that appears to fly above the water.
As Mayor and Hidalgo is pushing eco friendly initiatives in Paris and fighting climate change more broadly, the inventors came to see me back when no one believed they would be able to make it. That first meeting with the inventors took place so almost a year ago. I saw an opportunity to develop a fleet of flying, clean energy taxis, and so I supported them. And now that US President Donald Trump pulled out of the Paris Climate Agreement, the
Mayor is even more determined. Hi, I'm aki Ito, and I'm Murray my wad, and this week undercrypted, we'll see how too unlikely entrepreneurs designed a new kind of transportation device. It's a white convertible boat powered by a rechargeable battery and it seats five people. Last week we told you about an eighty year old inventor who's been trying to build flying cars his entire life. This week will go deep on another technology aiming to bypass traffic on your
morning commune. With a working prototype now able to whisk V I P s around, the startup has gotten past its first big hurdle, but there are still major challenges ahead before Sea Bubbles shakes up. How ordinary consumers like you and me get around stay with us When when I was a child, when I was ten, I had to dream. I wanted to make a bootfly. That's an anti boo, a matt Whiz and a sailor and one half of the Sea Bubbles duo. The other half is
Andrews Brindle. He's a windsurfing champion. Basically, I lived in Hawaii and then I did the classic change the girlfriend and up French Frenchman and coming back to Europe, back to France. These two guys are like star skating hutch and It's super high energy, passionate about engineering and has about a thousand ideas a minute. Andrews, on the other hand, is a mellow surfer type who usually takes the lead on business pitches. Alan Andrews met over a decade ago
on a sailboat called the High dropped her. Alan designed it, and together they set out to break the world speed record for sailing. The way they tell the story is basically they crashed a bunch of boats and finally they did beat the world speed record in two thousand and nine. It's something like fifty knots, which is almost sixty miles per hour. It's the godmother all boats, flying boats. And and I sailed with a land the crew for half
a day and then I go back. I go back, and I get a call next morning said, how if you'll be at the rock at nine o'clock in the morning from Alan, and she's then it didn't let me go pretty much the deal, like sailing on that boat. I'm a person I love to do live with radical things, but I do them quite calculated. So you know, writing big waves and Hawaiian stuff. Always choose my ways, always
choose my material in a good way. Just tagging you along the hood droptor the first time I think we're picking forty seven forty eight knots or something outside the Marseille. It took me about yeah, I would say five six rounds to know that today was not today I was going to die. The high drapter got a lot of attention, and in past years celebrities and techuliminaries have dropped by to sail on the boat. I was lucky because I received a text message from a Larry Page, founder of Google,
a text message from salar carandar Ceo of YouTube. A lot of requests in San Francico, a lot of the spirit in the bay. I first met Ala and Andrews a year ago. They showed me a sketch on the back of a notebook which was the first draft of the c bowl. Okay, I took a pain in the paper and I designed the sibable a cool Launders Anders high. I had an idea in how I man. Honestly, I thought that first sketch looked like the spaceship from the
Jetson's cartoon with a line. And Andre's so passionate about sir thing and sailing, it's probably not that surprising that they wanted to make better use of the water running through our cities. You have a lot of cars and pollution on the side of the river. Or the bay to sco on the on Geneva Lake in India, or today they have a boulevard sitting in the river which
is hardly used. Or you have different boats who are massive boast that takes a lot of people that go from stop to stop and takes forever to go from a to be there. But they were also interested in design. They wanted to make something that would really stand out in English into iconic, iconic, an iconic sibl as your first iPhone, as the first ta and I think you will discover an iconic Alan and Andre's got the first prototype ready in June and unbuild it at the Viva
Tech conference in Paris. So they're was the c Bubble was parked up in the air on a platform between a Google stand and a fleet of soft Bank robots. It's a little larger than a car and the bubble is glossy white with cream leather seats and a black dashboard. It still smelled of fresh paint then and it got a lot of attention from the crowd. The most people probably had no idea what it was. That is, in general, what we're talking about were having boats and leaves, no noise.
It gives no pollution at least no ways, so it don't roll well. When people first saw were these two big U shaped hydrofoils at the bottom of the vehicle. Yeah, it almost looks like the boat is sitting on a pair of skis, and it's really those skis and not the whole bottom of the boat that's gliding on the water when the boat moves right. The idea is basically to minimize how much of the boat actually touches the water, so it leaves a slimmer trail. It's pretty rare to
see this technology used outside of sailing competitions. I think the best way to put it, we're trying to cross the ideas in between boats, cars, planes and use this in our advantage. It's not necessarily boat as you've seen boats today. That's what they say that two nice ice in front Anders is referring to the headlights at the front. Add those to the U shaped hydrofoils we talked about, and you get a smiley face and there's an Allan
spent years perfecting this peculiar design with hydrofoils. First, they used it in their record breaking boat, the Hydropter, and they've adapted the concept for the c bubble. You cut the water as supposed to push it, so you don't get erosion on the river walls. You leave no pollution, you leave no noise. So when racing, these hydrofoils will give a boat that extra boost, but even when it's going slower, the boat will lift out of the water. Think of it like the wings on a plane. The
goal is not to go fast. The goal is to be stable and use this little energy as bustle so that you can you can actually use it in the rivers for a day as a taxi will go back and forth without leaving in the waves. The sea bubble can go as fast as twenty five knots, which is about twenty nine miles per hour. Some cities like Paris or London have a speed limit that's less than that, though, around ten knots or eleven miles per hour. Because the boat can run on varied little energy, it's possible to
use batteries to operate the whole thing. Once you get the hell out of the water, you lose for the percent drag, so it opens up your possibility to electric power that is in essence than a green power. For anders an alone. That's almost as revolutionary as the fact that the boat flies. For instance, New York have lots and river. You have a lot of pressure from the revue.
Put the water chairbine in the water. You can charge all the energy we need to move the full fleets of sea bubbles from the power will get either for the sun or from the from the river. But before the sea bubble or rides in the Hudson River, it will have to overcome some big challenges. Okay. So Alan and Andre's hope that one day their sea bubbles will be transporting people in cities around the world. But for that to happen, they need to land that first order
to get a fleet of boats up and running. Who's who's interested in in in the bubble? So far? Is it city mayors, companies? Who are your customers potentially for this? The Parris mayor invited us in Chicago, look on desp Okay. So there's this group called Sea forty Cities now and it's a lot of Europe. Forty connects more than ninety
of the world greatest cities. It's a global alliance of mayors from San Francisco to Tokyo who are taking action on climate issues, and Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris, is chairman of the group Climate Change. She's the most doubting challenge of this century and its affects, and she's really open doors for Anna and Anders with this community of mayors. So here I am a windsurfingself, and I find myself
at the table with the Sea forty mayors. Explained to them how they're going to sort out the cities for congestion and using the waterways. Sal The Sea forty group has made a big push for things like cleaner cars through local action and city to city collaboration instead of national or international regulation. They gave us the opportunity to talk about using the waterway. It's in a better way. And I'm Manuent for one, was saying that Ram Emmanuel
is the mayor of Chicago. They have done exactly what Lannidalgo is trying to do here in Paris. We can take our waterfronts, which defined our past but also become our future, to bring the people down to the waters, actually clean up the water front, to put restaurants there and so forth. Today we've opened a river walk that has brought billions of dollars of private development, and it's also brought uh the incredible amount of recreational opportunities to
the city when it goes. What I need is a small taxi vote, Anders says. There's also interest from other countries. Is for the We have ten fifteen cities in the US that is asking for us to come. There is fifteen cities in India. We have a Holland, we have New Zealand, we have Australia World One with the demand. Of course, none of these are firm orders yet, and city officials are gonna need to grapple with the difficult
balance of promoting innovative solutions with a tight budget. Sea Bubbles say they've lined up the price of the boat with that of a Tesla so fully equipped Model X, for instance, around a hundred and thirty thousand dollars. I wanted to know how affordable that price tag sounds, so I asked Ross Douglas. So the price point is not
that high if you have a high occupancy rate. Three years ago, Ross created a conference called Autonomy to gather regulators and companies like carmaker, Renault and energy provider Energy to talk about urban mobility. If you can move two hundred people a day at ten years ahead, um, that's suddenly two thousand euros a day. It's becoming quite a good business. So Ross's point here is that the sea bubble makes business sense if it's used as part of
a platform with hundreds or thousands of users. So it's a great solution for a small amount of people four or five of a relatively short distance. It runs up and down the San River. But because the sea bubbles are so small, it will need to go back and forth a lot for this to make financial sense. But if you look at the number of people moving in Paris in a day, I think it's in the it's
over twenty million a day. So with all these trips people are taking, the bubbles won't be enough on their own to reduce congestion and air pollution in a city like Paris. So you need a combination of metro, of buses, of um a sency if trains of motor cars. What's more, all those trips back and forth will require a battery that can handle hours of use. Right now, the bubble can run for about four hours on a single charge. Sea Bubbles are hoping to double that to about eight
hours as soon as this fall. Alan Enders even went to Tesla to learn about batteries and production lines. At the same time, Sea Bubbles is also still figuring out the details of its business model. It's unlikely the company will sell the boats directly to cities or even companies. Well, we outsource the production of the product. We outsourced the operations of the of the product. They're hoping private operators
will build and run them. That includes boats the dogs, which is obviously very different in every country we go to. But see Bubbles will run the app that lets people order a water taxi just like an uber, So obviously there are challenges. Despite that, Mayor and Hidalgo has been supportive and more broadly, she's open to new initiatives. Like other mayors, she's under pressure to improve air quality in her city. On pollution, we weren't going to sit around
and wait until someone found national or international solutions. It's an urgent matter and it's about people's health. We had to act. Even if changing behavior on car usage, for example, is hard and can cause controversy, we invented solutions. In an average urban air road traffic makes up as much as twenty of emissions ross says cars are low hanging fruit for mayors looking at cut emissions, as in, it's easier to get people to switch to an electric car
than to an electric airplane or an electric boat. But there's no single fix for pollution and congestion. That's why the Paris mayor, for instance, has backed other projects like autonomous electric shuttles in the city's business district. She's also interested in water transport solutions. The green investment fund we're creating could eventually support this kind of project. Investing in
this kind of project could potentially be very profitable. Ala and Anders have also been courting companies in the San Francisco Bay area, both as potential investors and potential customers. We met the last year Eric Meat, but what looking we Facebook? Two? We met Alonso in Falls and yes, we were looking with a lot of companies at the moment. By the way, Laurent Solely is Facebook's chief in France
and Southern Europe. For companies like Google or Facebook, the pitch is basically to say, we can help cut back all those hours that your staff waste being stuck in traffic. Google already operates a shuttle bus service, so employees who live in San Francisco can commute all the way down to its Mountain View headquarters and for a short time, Google also experimented with the ferry service, but they ended
that program about three years ago. In San Francisco, Sea Bubbles is promising to cut road time in half by avoiding traffic jams and going through the water, and at least here in the valley, people will basically do anything to solve or minimize the time they spend in traffic. It's really this and housing costs that I hear people complain about the most. But even if one of these companies says yes, they wouldn't necessar fairly by a fleet, just like mayors, they could come in as investors or
rent out a fleet of boats as a service. So then obviously on number one tolees operators, secondary the tobes, B two B. We have a lot of hotel chains that are asking for Sea Bubbles to transport the people. And thirdly it's customers that want to have the private sea Bubble to to maneuver. For now, Sea Bubbles is building a few more vehicles to take them on world tour, currently planned for September while they work out the business model and look for customers. Sea Bubbles is running on
about sixteen million dollars that they've raised so far. A VC, an insurance company, and an angel investor who started a drone manufacturer in France have invested so far. As we speak, Allah and Anders are working to raise more than a hundred million dollars in new funding. They were hoping to finalize that funding around earlier this summer, but negotiations are still underway with Ester's in the US, Switzerland and France.
For now, they've pushed the deadline back until September. It's been it's been a very quick, crazy adventure for you guys for the past a year and a half. Now we love to be the quick quickie. You're getting your adrenaline rush. And that's it for this week's episode of Decrypted. Thanks for listening. Do you have a story that you'd like to share with us? You can get in touch at Decrypted at Bloomberg dot net and you can follow me on Twitter at Marie Underscore, Underscore Paris and I'm
at Akio seven. If you haven't already, please subscribe to our show wherever you get your podcasts, and while you're there, I hope you'll leave us a rating and a review. I read each and every single one of these, and they really do go a long way in getting this podcast in front of more people. This episode was produced by p I Get, Carrie, Liz Smith, and Magnus Hendrickson. Alec McCabe is a head of Bloomberg Podcasts. We'll see you next week.