Skip down the Seine in a flying river taxi

To unclog the busy streets of Paris, two entrepreneurs are building an egg-shaped river shuttle that will essentially fly above the Seine, the next iteration of which will be summoned by a smartphone and piloted by a robot. If that’s not incredible enough, a founder of SeaBubbles said on July 28 that the company had raised $555,000 to do just that, with backers including the founder of drone-maker Parrot SA, Partech Ventures and the French government-backed BPI fund. Another funding round will take place by the end of August to develop a taxi app and docking stations around the pod.

The company wants to build battery-powered bubble-shaped ships that hover a few inches above water and transport as many as five people at a time. The founders intend to be operating by the summer of 2017. “You’ve got packed roads and empty waterways in a lot of cities — there’s an obvious opportunity,” co-founder Alain Thebault said in an interview.

“We want to build water taxis.”Founders Anders Bringdal and Thebault, a surfer and a math-loving sailor respectively, together broke the record for speed on a floating sailboat they’d designed in 2009. Each shuttle will carry five people, including a pilot, but the goal is to forgo the pilot and make the system fully autonomous in a few years once regulation allows it, Thebault said.


Picture: SeaBubbles (Twitter)

The bubbles would get a lift and hover above water thanks to a similar physics phenomenon to the one that propels their record-setting Hydroptere sailboat in the air. Sea Bubbles plans to spend the money from its seed funding round on building full-size prototype pods of 4.3 meters by 2.3 meters (14.1 feet by 7.5 feet), that can go as fast as 25 knots (29 miles per hour).

On the Hydroptere, the boat the two entrepreneurs designed in 2009, they hosted guests including Alphabet Inc. co-founder Larry Page, Prince Albert of Monaco and solar-powered plane aviator Bertrand Piccard.