It’s a boat, it’s a plane, it’s REGENT’s Seafarer | E2205

This Week in Startups

Jason Calacanis

Technology

4.4 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 8 November 2025

⏱️ 75 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Today’s show:

*The key to avoiding long airport delays? Low-altitude sea planes! Why didn’t you think of that?

We’ve got an awesome line-up of TWiST 500 founders giving us an inside glimpse inside their startups on this Friday special edition.

FIRST: Billy Thalheimer of REGENT introduces us to their aircraft/boat hybrid The Seaglider, and walk us through how it all works, AND why they’re operating in BOTH the commercial and defense sectors from their Rhode Island HQ.

THEN, we’ve got Convexia co-founder Ayaan Parekh showcasing how they’re using a collective of specialist AI agents to exploit other pharma labs’ leftovers and turn them into new drugs and treatments for rare diseases.

FINALLY, Hunter Leath of Archil joins the show to tell us why efficient utilization of cloud data remains a surprisingly complex, and unsolved problem. His solution? Caching-as-a-Service! Find out how it all works, and why pre-caching is SO difficult to do, in this TWiST exclusive chat.

Timestamps:

(03:01) Billy Thalheimer of REGENT introduces us to the Seaglider
(05:06) Inside the EV aircraft/boat hybrid’s three modes of operation
(08:22) How REGENT uses low altitude flight to avoid airport-related hassles

(9:42) Sentry - New users get 3 months free of the Business plan (covers 150k errors). Go to ⁠http://sentry.io/twist⁠ and use code TWIST

(13:57) The converging tech that makes Seaglider possible
(18:20) How REGENT is operating in BOTH the commercial and defense sectors
(19:39) LinkedIn Ads - Start converting your B2B audience into high quality leads today. Launch your first campaign and get $250 FREE when you spend at least $250. Go to ⁠http://linkedin.com/thisweekinstartups⁠ to claim your credit.
(25:05) Why Rhode Island?!
(29:23) Pipedrive - Bring your entire sales process into one elegant space. Get started with a 30 day free trial at ⁠https://pipedrive.com/twist⁠
(31:04) Convexia co-founder Ayan Parekh joins Alex to discuss “the world’s first AI-maximalist pharmaceutical company”
(33:02) Using AI agents to revisit leftover bio IP and unused data
(33:22) Why so many drugs fail to reach market
(35:46) Applying different agents to different kinds of tasks
(44:26) The unique opportunities posed by rare diseases
(46:58) On the road toward vertical integration
(50:48) Hunter Leath of Archil tells us why utilizing cloud data effectively remains a complex, unsolved problem
(51:56) What is “Caching as a Service”?
(55:53) Why pre-caching is NOT obvious and “tremendously difficult to do”
(57:00) Why the major cloud players didn’t built this themselves
(01:00:37) Deliberately keeping the focus narrow… for now…

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Thank you to our partners:

Sentry - New users get 3 months free of the Business plan (covers 150k errors). Go to http://sentry.io/twist and use code TWIST

LinkedIn Ads - Start converting your B2B audience into high quality leads today. Launch your first campaign and get $250 FREE when you spend at least $250. Go to http://linkedin.com/thisweekinstartups to claim your credit.

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Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	So how do you manage to have a thing that flies and doesn't use airports? It feels like you've hacked the system. We are creating a fundamentally new vehicle. It goes fast. It flies low. It's sort of operating in this different way. Sea gliders are sort of hybrids of boats and planes, sort of use the best of both worlds. We'll go from Providence here to New York. That's about 180 miles. We can do that on
0:21.4	battery technology. So you're going to board right next to the city center. We don't need to travel
0:25.6	to an airport. It's floating at the dock like a boat. Then we're going to hydrofoil through the harbor
0:30.6	or through the bay. We're going up to about 50 miles an hour on those hydrofoils to maneuver
0:35.8	through the crowded waterways. We take off from those
0:39.1	foils, so it's float foil fly. This is exactly what I was hoping to get because I do go to New York
0:45.1	and currently takes three to half, four hours on Amtrak when the trains are on time, which just seems
0:50.3	archaic in the extreme and unimproved since like 1860. Technical hard part of what we're doing and why we can only do this now with electric propulsion and digital flight control systems.
1:00.3	Where are we in terms of progress?
1:02.2	This week in startups is brought to you by PipeDrive.
1:06.0	Bring clarity and control to your sales process with Pipe Drive, the number one CRM for small and medium-sized
1:12.5	businesses. Supercharge your sales today. Start with a 30-day free trial, PipeDrive.com slash
1:18.7	twist. LinkedIn ads. Start converting your B2B audience into high-quality leads today.
1:24.8	Launch your first campaign and get $250 free when you spend at least 250. Go to
1:30.7	LinkedIn.com slash this week in startups to claim your credit. And Century, your team should be
1:37.4	focused on shipping features, not chasing down bugs. New users get three months free of the business
1:43.0	plan which covers 150,000 errors.
1:45.4	Go to century.io slash twist and use the code twist.
1:49.0	Welcome to this weekend startups. This is Alex. It is Friday, November 7th, 2025, and we have three awesome interviews for you today.
1:58.0	That means three Twist 500 startups, three founders, and three
2:02.0	chances to learn from some of the best out there today. First up on the show, Regent. It's a
2:07.3	Rhode Island-based electric boat, hydrofoil, airplane startup that could shake up both how
	...

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