In 2017, a ferry began crossing Kerala’s Vembanad lake carrying 75 passengers — silently, with no diesel engine and no fuel bill. The Aditya, built by Kochi startup Navalt, went on to ferry 3.2 million+ passengers and save an estimated 320,000+ litres of diesel. Nearly a decade later, the company says it has 86 projects in hand 45 already operational and 41 under construction spanning ferries, workboats and water taxis and its latest, Barracuda, is billed as India’s fastest solar-electric boat.

Navigation by alternative energy

Navalt Solar & Electric Boats Private Limited was founded in Kochi in 2013 by Sandith Thandasherry — a naval architect from IIT Madras who had worked in shipyards in South Korea and Japan before an MBA in France. The name is a contraction of “Navigation by Alternative Energy,” and the company began as a joint venture between Navgathi India, France’s AltEn and EVE Systems. It is the kind of cross-border, deep-domain founding story that explains how a Kerala startup ended up the subject of a Harvard Business Review case study (via IIM Bangalore, 2026).

The thesis was simple and contrarian: waterways are the ideal first market for electric propulsion. Boats run fixed routes at steady speeds, solar panels love open water, and diesel ferries are ruinously expensive to operate. While the auto industry argued about charging infrastructure, Navalt built boats where the fuel falls from the sky.

Read the full article here : Navalt’s Solar Boats: India’s Fastest Runs Without Fuel