ZEFIRO

Electric foiling vessel

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Genoa · world premiere 2026

Flight over water

Passenger boats have not changed in fifty years: loud, heavy, burning fuel to push water aside. Zefiro stops pushing. Above twelve knots it lifts clear of the surface and flies — no wake, no noise, no emissions.

See the craft How it flies

Drag is the tax every hull pays. Leave the water and the tax disappears.

80%

Drag reduction once the hull is airborne. The same battery carries the same people more than four times as far.

The craft

Built as one
piece of physics

Zefiro foiling with passengers aboard
Open deck · in flight
  1. 01

    0 kn

    Cruise speed

    Twenty knots held steady on battery alone, with a top end of twenty-eight. Flight begins at twelve.

  2. 02

    0 NM

    Range

    A full working day between charges. No fuel, no fumes, nothing left behind in the water.

  3. 03

    0 + 1

    Seats

    Eight passengers and a pilot, in a cabin or open-deck layout. Nine point seven metres of hull, 3.8 wide at rest.

  4. 04

    < 0.0 m

    Draft, foils in

    The wings fold flush into the hull. Zefiro enters any marina, canal or shallow bay a conventional tender can.

  5. 05

    0

    Emissions

    Fully electric, fully carbon. Cleared for protected marine areas and zero-emission zones where combustion is banned outright.

The system

Two states,
one hull

The foil geometry comes straight out of the last America's Cup generation, reworked for passengers. A retraction mechanism — patent filed, UIBM n° 102025000015892 — folds the wings into the hull, so the same boat behaves like an ordinary tender at the dock and like an aircraft at speed.

Zefiro in side view with the foils folded into the hull Zefiro in side view with the foils lowered and the hull clear of the water
Hull in the water General arrangement · scale in metres · WL = waterline

Where it works

Three routes,
one platform

Drag to explore →

Zefiro as a superyacht tender
01 / Tender

Superyacht

Silent ship-to-shore at twenty knots, with a draft that clears the shallows a conventional tender has to go around.

Zefiro on a resort transfer
02 / Transfer

Resort

Island transfers with no wake to damage moorings and no engine noise over the water at six in the morning.

Zefiro as an urban water taxi
03 / Transit

Urban taxi

Lagoons and canal cities where wake is regulated and combustion is being phased out. Zefiro is compliant on both counts.

The team

An architect, a naval
engineer, an engineer

Three disciplines, one vessel. Select a name.

The three founders of Zefiro

  1. Novara, 1967. Architect from the Politecnico di Milano, with a thesis on a public transport vessel for lagoon waters, and an industrial designer trained at the Scuola Politecnica di Design. He has run his own practice in Milan since 1992. A sailor and navigator from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic and the Arctic; since 2005 his work has been product design for industry and boatbuilding, both production runs and one-offs.

  2. Milan, 1973. Yacht design, computational fluid dynamics and the engineering of composite structures. Thirty years taking complex objects from the first sketch through to production, on sailing and motor boats that have won awards for both design and engineering. At sea he has been helmsman, trimmer, tactician and skipper, from monohulls to ocean-going multihulls.

  3. Born 1964, engineer from the Politecnico di Milano. He started at the CNR when artificial intelligence was still science fiction, worked in Germany and Austria, and joined the Cannon Group in 1995 building industrial machinery. He has stayed hands-on with technology ever since, and treats innovation as an adventure that does not finish.

Press

“Electric and flying, Zefiro is a full foiling, full electric and full carbon vessel”

Vanity Fair Italia — the most innovative, Genoa International Boat Show 2026. Translated from the Italian original.

Next

The design is done.
The first hull is not.

Four engineering phases are complete: hull and hydrodynamics, foil mechanism, propulsion and flight control, and the production-ready interior. What Zefiro needs now is an industrial partner to build the prototype.

Stage
Design complete, seeking prototype partner
Patent
Filed · UIBM n° 102025000015892
Looking for
Manufacturing · licensing · investment