For everyone out there who saw REGENT Craft’s Seagliders when they came out of stealth back in 2021 and thought, “Holy hell, that is cool,” well, good news—a mega pool of investors agrees with you.
This morning, the startup—which builds seacraft that are a cross between a hydrofoil, a boat, and an aircraft—announced that it has raised a mega $240M Series B, bringing total funding raised to over $340M.
- The round is a 50-50 mix of equity and debt—it was co-led by Mare Liberum and AE Ventures, with debt capital provided by Erebor Bank. Yes, Palmer Luckey’s Erebor Bank.
- New investor DCVC and existing investors Founders Fund, Caffeinated Capital, Lockheed Martin Ventures, Japan Airlines, and Giant Step Capital also joined the round. Heck of a cap table.
REGENT Co-founder and CEO Billy Thalheimer told Tectonic that they will use this funding to build out their new 255,000-square-foot manufacturing facility and fulfill the, like, absolute sh*t ton of orders they already have.
- The company reportedly has an order book of over $10B.
“This is really enabling Regent to get to manufacturing scale,” Thalheimer said. “We have a ton of customers out there. We’ve booked out several years of manufacturing capacity in firm commercial orders. We have growing contracts with the Department of War. So, this is really just keeping us on pace—we have real customers with real cash in the bank, and they want their Seagliders as soon as possible.”
“I think a lot of the conviction from investors in this round was on our growing defense portfolio,” he added.
It’s a bird, it’s a plane: REGENT is one of those companies with tech so wild you sometimes have to blink to make sure you’re not seeing things.
- The company builds a range of Seagliders (trademarked name) that the company describes as “high-speed hydrofoiling wing-in-ground effect (WIG) craft that operate over the water within a wingspan of the surface, combining the speed of an aircraft with the convenience of a boat.” Think of a plane, but, like, on the water.
- They’re designed to be, like, mega-fast—like, up to 180 mph fast. That’s pretty dang speedy for something legally treated as a boat.
- And it’s not just a defense thing—the company is pitching these gliders for everything from CASEVAC and resupply to commercial sea travel.
Mini me: So far, the Seagliders come in three flavors:
- Viceroy: REGENT’s flagship 12-passenger seaglider, designed to travel up to 180 mph and carry passengers or cargo for commercial and defense missions. The defense variant can carry up to 3,500 lb and operate without a runway. The OG version is electric, but the company is also developing a hybrid version with a range of up to 1,400 nm.
- Squire: A smaller autonomous defense seaglider designed for missions including ISR, smaller-scale logistics, search and rescue, and anti-submarine warfare. It can travel at up to 70 knots (81 mph) and has a range of over 100 nm.
- Monarch: A much larger planned seaglider designed to carry up to 100 passengers, aimed primarily at higher-capacity commercial routes.
Flying carpet: And these things are, like, actually in the water—or in the air directly above the water, if we are being technical.
- A full-scale Viceroy went in the water in March 2025 and began sea trials in Rhode Island’s Narragansett Bay with humans aboard.
- The full-scale vehicle rose out of the water onto its hydrofoils with crew aboard for the first time in June 2025.
- Squire—the smaller defense-y drone boat—was cleared for testing in 2025 and started hydrofoiling alongside Viceroy. It actually flew—like transitioned into wing-in-ground-effect flight—in April of this year.
- Worth noting: Though Squire was actually introduced later than Viceroy, Squire managed to fly first. Thalheimer said that a fully-crewed Viceroy flight is “imminent.”
Get your camo on: The company has really doubled down on the whole defense thing in the past few years—they launched a specific defense arm (REGENT Defense) last summer and have been seriously scaling up their work with the DoD since.
- Back in 2023, the company signed its first contract with the Marine Corps (a $4.75M agreement with the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab) to develop Seagliders for logistics in littoral environments. Indo-Pacific, much?
- They then scored a $10M follow-on with MCWL in 2025 and started exploring other missions, including contested logistics, MEDEVAC/CASEVAC, ISR, and launched effects. The company kicked off mission demonstrations with the Marines in 2025, including dockside casualty loading, beach extraction, and open-water rescue.
- Thalheimer also said they just completed a demo of Squire with sensing and jamming equipment on board and that the drone has “gone off to military exercises and demonstrated abilities in electronic warfare, communications, sensing, etc.”
- They’ve also participated in DoD war-games (where they say they improved theater-setting timelines by 40 percent) and have development relationships with USSOCOM and the US Coast Guard R&D Center.
“The whole Department of War focus is on the Indo-Pacific and China and the Strait of Taiwan, but we don’t have vehicles that can operate from the open water and move around quickly and over long range in that environment,” Thalheimer said. He’s betting REGENT can fill that gap.
I’m a real boy: All this new cash money means the company can move from testing to actually getting gliders into customers’ hands.
- Thalheimer told Tectonic that “the plan is to get the first sea gliders out the door by the end of next year.”
- He said that the first few Viceroys that come off the line will be “hand-built,” but as they scale they will “leverage more tooling and equipment and automation.”
- The company is aiming to be on programs of record for the Seagliders by 2029, he added, but that in the meantime they have some “pretty exciting stuff coming up with Squire soon.” Currently, they’re shooting for OTAs and other “rapid acquisition opportunities,” like they have with the Marines.
- They’re also forming defense partnerships (as yet unnamed) that will “enable further scale [and] further mission applicability in this world,” Thalheimer said.
“If you look at the history of Regent, we’ve been a lot about prototyping and technology development. We’ve built out these order books, and we’ve laid these plans with regulators, and we have real customers and market traction, but largely we’ve been focused on proving out that sea glider technology is real,” he added. “This is the round that transitions us to commercialization and productization and manufacturing. This is the round that powers us to get seagliders into real commercial and military markets.”
