Q&A with Jenny Keisu

Electric boats have been around since 1839, when German inventor Moritz von Jacobi demonstrated a 24-footer that transported 14 passengers at 3 mph on the Neva River. As steam and, eventually, naphtha and gas engines took over in the early 20th century, the use of electric boats declined.

Today, a plethora of electric-boat builders vie for what has become a relatively niche but valuable piece of the new-boat market. Some builders utilize electric outboards, others foil their boats above the water, while a larger number rely on traditional inboard running gear. All of them say electric boating is the future of the sport.

Swedish builder X Shore launched its first electric prototype in 2018, and introduced its first production boat, a fully electric center console, in late 2020. That boat would become the Eelex 8000, and it has garnered a respectable number of positive reviews in the press. The company has added two models since then, both built atop the Eelex 8000’s 26-foot hull.

At the head of X Shore is CEO Jenny Keisu, who came to the business in 2019 with extensive experience in the mergers-and-acquisitions and private-equity spaces. In her role as CEO, she manages overall operations and is responsible for the company’s strategic direction. Additionally, she advises companies working to achieve the United Nations’ sustainable development goals.

Soundings Trade Only connected with Keisu in late September to learn more about her background, the future of electric boats, and the importance of sustainability at X Shore, among other topics. This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

You have an interesting professional background. Tell us about your career before you joined X Shore.

I started my career as a business lawyer. I spent a number of years doing public and private mergers and acquisitions. Then I spent some 10 years in private equity, the first five with Nordic Capital, which is one of the larger leading firms. Next, I started my own firm together with a couple of friends, and I was the CEO. That private equity firm is now Europe’s largest impact fund, So a very atypical background for a boating CEO.

Tell us about your boating background.

I’m an avid boater. I grew up sailing, and I spend most of my time out on the Stockholm Archipelago when I’m not in the city working. So I have a decent boating background.

Why did you decide to join X Shore?

I came from the sailing side, and most sailing people don’t like noise. Actually, you hate motorboats because they’re noisy, and they’re polluting. Tons of shore erosion. And then I had twins. So when the twins came around, I just felt like, OK, so now I’m going on vacation, and my stress level is going up because sailing with twins might not be the greatest experience.

We ended up buying a place on an island, which meant I had to have a motorboat to go back and forth to land. I was just so shocked about the noise level and all the fumes. And I didn’t want to put my kids next to the motor because of the exhaust. I mean, is that even good for them? Obviously not. We had tons of those situations. And it was noisy, and it was very costly with all that fuel, and then you start to translate that into carbon dioxide. That’s why I ended up in electric boating.

X Shore was a family-run project in the beginning. Konrad Bergström, who founded the company, was doing X Shore together with his girlfriend and his mother-in-law. They had a rigid-hull inflatable boat with a Torqeedo motor. I felt like, yeah, sure, we can try to build this into a company, but I want to build it my way. We have been doing that since late 2019. I’ve hired every single employee and built the company the way I wanted. So that was a very good fit for me.

What is important to X Shore as a company?

X Shore wants to get to zero-emission boating. We like sailing yachts, and we like electric boats. What we don’t like are the polluting internal-combustion boats. And the only way to get there, if you ask me, is to have people transfer over to something sustainable. We don’t think there needs to be a lot of compromises with electric boats — such as, well, you can go electric, but then you need to only go slow. Or, you can go electric, but then you need to fly on foils. Or, you can go electric, but then the boat has to be ugly, or any number of other concessions.

We also believe that you need to have a product that is equally good or, preferably, better in terms of experience, so that it’s easy to swap over from traditional powerboats. It needs to be, relatively speaking, close in price, too. I mean, you can probably make up for some of the price because you’re saving so much on fuel and maintenance, but our electric boats cannot be five times as expensive, or no one will transfer over.

Were your experiences in mergers and acquisitions and private equity helpful to the vision?

Definitely. The experience in building a company and tapping the right resources has been great. I mean, I built Summa Equity and am now building X Shore. And of course, plenty of previous colleagues are either an investor in X Shore or they own an X Shore boat. So of course, that has also been helpful.

In how many countries are X Shore boats available?

We’re still focusing on Europe and North America. We do have some presence with boats in the Persian Gulf area as well, on the other side of Mediterranean. But the focus area is still North America, the United States and Europe, which are the largest markets. For us, it makes sense to keep on focusing on those, rather than to spread ourself thin. We want to keep growing in Europe and in North America instead.

Tell us about your last round of private funding, which came this past April.

We’ve been raising more or less one round per year up until today, and the funding has come mainly from my previous network rather than from firms, because we are still a relatively small company. We have a lot of those kinds of investors from my previous network, SEB, which is the largest corporate bank here. It’s not private equity, but asset allocation.

You’ve been doing partnerships here in the United States, including with Safe Harbor. What other partnerships are in the works?

We believe firmly that partnership is the new leadership. If you want to transition to electric and really drive change in the world, you cannot do it with the purpose of competing against other electric-boat companies. All of us need to pull together, because it’s a huge challenge that we are up against with climate change today. So what we are trying to do is to go for tons of different partnerships. We have the one that you mentioned with Safe Harbor Marinas. Obviously, they have a very clear sustainability profile. They’re the largest marina operator in the world, a perfect target for us.

We also have a lot of collaboration with other electric-vehicle companies from the Nordics. Sweden is one of the most prominent EV hubs in the world. We collaborate a lot with companies who build EV airplanes, recreational vehicles, autonomous trucks and Cake, which is electric motorbikes. We also have a collaboration with Awake electric jetboards and Rivian trucks in the United States. For us, it’s everything we can do to drive the change in a positive way. Some of those partnerships are formal; some are more relaxed.

There’s a firm commitment to electric propulsion in Sweden, and in Europe as a whole. Are U.S. consumers still a challenge for your business?

I think that in our part of the world, we have the luxury of having existing green and clean electricity. So, of course, it’s easier for us here. The United States and other countries are still working on the energy transition, some more than we are still. We have a lot of existing hydro, solar and wind power in Sweden and Europe.

Having said that, there’s been a big shift over the last few years. Three or four years ago, when we were out on the ferries, everyone was asking, “Where’s your charging cord? How far will I be able to go?” And now, just this year, it’s hugely different. There’s tons of other electric boating manufacturers or EV propulsion companies out there. They’re still at a much earlier stage — they might not have customers on three continents and lots of boats out there — but just to see that we are now lots of companies coming out, people start to really get into it and look at it seriously.

We’ve always had questions about range, speed and charging. Today, more people have a better understanding of how electric boats work and the questions to ask. We get many more in-depth questions about the products and the use case. It’s less of a challenge as time goes by and consumers become more educated. I don’t think people are questioning as much whether this market will go electric. The question is how long will it take — one year, five years, 10 years? We don’t really know how quickly the market will grow. It depends on lots of other factors, like inflation and the general economy, and when people are trading in their existing boats for new ones. But the fact that much of the market will go electric, I don’t think that anyone is doubting that anymore.

Will electric boats take over the entire market, or are there limitations for certain use cases?

I think people understand that electric boating will not take 100% of the space, because deepwater fishing will still require an option other than electric. But we believe that 95% of all recreational boating use cases can be served by electric propulsion.

How many boats have you shipped since the launch of the Eelex 8000, which came to the United States in late 2021?

About 100 hulls in total between North America and Europe.

How do you feel about your current model lineup?

If you go to boats.com, they name our Eelex 8000 as one as the 10 best center console boats in the world. And not just electric boats — among the 10 best center consoles in the world, regardless of propulsion. We have a great lineup right now, but our boats are still a bit expensive; they are premium boats. That said, fuel is very, very cheap on an electric boat because you only pay for electricity, and maintenance is substantially lower. So it’s not a big difference from that perspective.

Tell us about your latest model, the PRO. It looks like a nautical school bus.

I don’t think that we should solely count on private individuals during this transition for us to become a sustainable society. We’ve seen that our order book is 20% business-to-business, so we started to look at whether we should offer a model that is made for municipalities and businesses.

One of our local municipalities has two schools on islands, which is a perfect model for a commercialized version of our 8-meter [26-foot] platform to ferry students to school. There’s also a need for transporting older people who live on the islands to shore and back. It’s a great opportunity to reduce a lot of carbon dioxide that would have gone into the atmosphere. The PRO model is designed to suit these types of situations with 100% electric power.

In Sweden and the European Union, governments have subsidies that can help with the transition when you are transferring a fleet from diesel or gas to electric. For the school customer, it was able to have a huge part of the boat financed because of the fact that they’re saving so much carbon dioxide on that route. That is a big thing when it comes to boating because a normal leisure boat emits around four times as much CO₂ as a normal car. Leisure boats in Sweden emit more, or at least around as much CO₂ as domestic flights do over a full year.

As X Shore and consumer demand grow, are there plans to expand and build boats in other countries?

We have a huge factory here in Sweden that is highly scalable. Today, we build based on how much we’re selling and how quickly the market is growing, but the capacity of that factory is more than we’ll need for a long time. If we were selling hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of boats every year, we could handle it all in that factory.

The new PRO model does open a lot of interesting doors, though. Let’s say that in some countries, you would want to use the PRO as a Coast Guard boat or some other kind of service boat. It’s these types of larger contracts where a customer may want, either from a regulatory perspective or some other perspective, to have boats built locally. Well, we’re a very efficient manufacturer after all these years, so we could do that if need be.

Battery capacity seems to be the holdup in terms of overall range at speed. How do you see this problem resolving?

With the current battery technology, it’s important to understand the effect that weight has on the hull, because they are heavy. If you just take an average-size center console and you throw an electric motor on it, those boats are designed to predominantly have fuel tanks or, at best, fuel and batteries. It’s all about building the boat around the battery in terms of center-of-gravity weight distribution, and then you can get it more optimal.

At this point, we don’t really need better battery technology to cover more use cases. All boaters think they’re out much more than they really are, and we have the data to support that notion because all of our boats are connected. A normal trip on the Mediterranean, for example, is less than 7 nautical miles. And in the Nordic, where we have a big archipelago, we are going the farthest — 20 nautical miles is a lot here. You can still do that with our boats with mixed driving. I mean, if you go slower speeds, like sailing, then you can be out for 24 hours and maybe even more than that. It doesn’t take new battery technology.

Having said that, there’s tons of stuff happening in the battery space at the moment, in the coming 12 to 24 months, that we’re looking forward to seeing.

Your company uses cork in decks and toe rails, with an option for natural flax fibers in the hull and deck laminates. What other materials are you eyeing?

We want to be net-zero everything by 2030. Of course, it needs to start with net-zero batteries. When we look at fiberglass hulls, the most important thing is to produce those with clean energy from the start because otherwise you’re building a huge carbon footprint from the beginning. Also, this kind of construction uses tons of plastic, and the resin has styrene, which is a carcinogenic gas.

We try to make different kinds of hulls. There are flax fibers, as you mentioned, but we’ve never sold any boats with that option. We’ve built two that we’re using as demo boats to see how that works. It performs well, but we noticed that then we need to use more of the flax fiber than with carbon or fiberglass. The flax is better from a carbon perspective, but since you’re using so much, it doesn’t make that big a difference. Carbon fiber has a bigger footprint, but you can use much less of it.

X Shore utilizes clean manufacturing, which reduces any carcinogenic gases that used to be vented out into air. Also, we are doing all the drilling and milling in huge CNC boxes, so we don’t let out any particles, which is also very harmful for humans and the environment. Lastly, we are so good at building hulls so that we can use 50% less materials. This reduced the amount of plastic in our hulls last year by 50%.

It sounds as if X Shore is being vigilant about its suppliers.

We don’t look at how you build boats the same way as many other builders do. We build our boats very similar to how you build trucks or airplanes or similar, and that’s why we have this net-zero focus. You have to carefully look at the entire build process to make sure everyone involved is working toward net-zero and using clean technologies every step along the way.

How do you create a culture of innovation at X Shore?

We try to keep showing people that we do impossible stuff all the time. X Shore employees question the impossible and see if we can do it better. I think it’s very important to allow people to make mistakes. I often say, “You can make 100 mistakes today. I’m totally fine with that, as long as you own them and you correct them tomorrow.” Because then it’s much better that we do the right thing tomorrow. Nothing is impossible. I don’t want to hear that word.

What sorts of headwinds are you facing as a Swedish boatbuilder?

Everyone is facing headwinds all the time, especially in this market, I think. We don’t have any issue with skilled labor. I think that is because we have purpose-driven companies. If people want to come work for us, it’s because they feel like they are part of the solution. They see this big issue with climate change, and they want to be part of the solution — that is very important for us. Also, the mentality of nothing is impossible, that we’ll make it work. We need people collaborating to make this transition happen. 

This article was originally published in the November 2023 issue.