Sampriti Bhattacharyya grew up in Kolkata (Calcutta), India, with an older sister and two college teachers for parents. At age 12 she set her sights on being an aerospace engineer after seeing a documentary about the Apollo Moon landing. Few Indian women were in tech at the time and Sampriti believed that realizing her dreams meant getting to America. She had no idea how she would do that.

She stoked her dreams while attending college by teaching herself robotics and taking cosmology classes at a planetarium. She worked on ideas for redesigning the Mars rover and built a sun-tracking solar panel ― her first robot! Sampriti saw herself as a scientist and an explorer. She wanted to invent things.

Then she learned about internships! She entered the words “internship America national lab” into Google and started sending emails. 260 messages later there were no replies. She started sneaking into conferences to get people’s contact information. After a total of 540 emails, one worked out with an internship at Fermilab's high-energy physics lab, doing engineering for the Tevatron particle accelerator.

Going to America was her first time on an airplane and her first time traveling alone. She was terrified and cried during her connection in Frankfurt but arrived intact and discovered she was good at technical work. Working at Fermilab was a turning point in her life.

At 23 she returned to India, where she backpacked alone, had a near-miss with a landslide, and developed a philosophy around doing hard things.

A master’s program at Ohio State brought Sampriti back to America, where she researched particle accelerators while working on flight control systems for NASA. Next was a doctoral program at MIT, researching autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs). During this time, Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 went down in the Indian Ocean. The searchers’ inability to find the wreckage frustrated Sampriti and prompted her to start Hydroswarm, a startup to build underwater drones for a variety of applications ― from ocean mapping to inspections of submerged surfaces, like pipelines and ship hulls. The business didn’t fly, but Sampriti wasn’t done. She was convinced there was a massive potential for building the next-generation maritime company using cheaper computing and sensing.

In 2021 Sampriti and a co-founder started Navier, a venture to build hydrofoiling, electric boats. Their 7-person operation in a former Navy warehouse evokes images of a war-era skunk works. The building is cold and dark, but with serious tech and serious engineers getting down to business. In November, after just two years, Navier released its first boat, the Navier 30, with a backlog of pre-orders. Says Sampriti, “You identify your core strength and then find the best people for everything else.” She’s not kidding. They brought on Paul Bieker as their naval architect and advisor. Among other credentials, Bieker had been Oracle Team USA’s principal design engineer for the 35th America's Cup.

We can only guess what the future will bring for Navier and the SSC, but with our close alignment of values, beliefs, and cultures we expect it to be good. This February we will be holding a summit at Navier to gather Treasure Island’s Clipper Cove waterfront stakeholders. Stay tuned for more...

You can see short videos of the N30 in Maine (0:09) and San Francisco (0:07).

The crew of a boat racing in Key West Race Week use their weight to balance the boat against a large spinnaker. Using crew weight is an effective strategy to keep boats upright in most conditions. When the big puffs hit, altering course may be the most effective strategy to keep the boat under control.