trols of the Seaglider with his business partner, Mike Klinker. Five years ago, Billy and Klinker founded REGENT with the goal of producing— and, eventually, mass-producing— an all-electric Seaglider. The company, whose name stands for Regional Electric Ground Effect Nautical Transport, has impressed investors and government officials alike with its rapid growth and vision for a new system of transportation. If they succeed— and investors have bet more than $ 100 million that they will— they’ ll not only revolutionize global ocean travel but put Rhode Island at the center of a new industry poised to remake our interactions along the coast.
It’ s a good day to be in Quonset.
THE STORY BEGINS, AS SO MANY TECH STARTUPS DO, on a college campus.
Thalheimer and Klinker were both aerospace engineering students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where they sat next to each other in introduction to aerospace engineering class freshman year. Thalheimer, an aspiring astronaut from Natick, Massachusetts, was on the sailing team. Klinker, who grew up in New Hampshire and dreamed of building airplanes, did crew. They completed their senior year capstone project together.
After completing their bachelor’ s degrees in 2014 and master’ s degrees in 2016, they went their separate ways in the fast-paced aerospace world. Thalheimer, who still harbored astronaut dreams, applied to fly F-35 fighter jets with the Vermont Air National Guard. He was accepted but contracted Lyme disease while hiking in the Green Mountains and ended up working instead for Aurora Flight Sciences. The company( now owned by Boeing) develops
cutting-edge technologies for aircraft and unmanned aerial vehicles. There, he worked on eVTOLs, or electric vertical takeoff and landing vehicles, then on track to become the next big thing in commercial aviation.
Klinker, meanwhile, was designing autonomous drones, first with a startup building agricultural drones and then at MIT’ s federally funded Lincoln Laboratory. Eventually, he, too, found himself working at Aurora Flight Sciences, where Thalheimer had begun to think beyond eVTOLs. The craft was at the forefront of innovation, but its range was limited by battery storage. Like traditional aircraft, eVTOLs are regulated by the Federal Aviation Administration, subjecting them to a lengthy certification process and strict pilot standards.
In 2020, Thalheimer approached Klinker and other MIT contacts with an idea. What if they designed an electric vehicle that flew through the air but operated over water so it was regulated like a boat? The vehicle would use a phenomenon called wingin-ground effect to take advantage of air pockets over the surface and fly more efficiently than a traditional aircraft. The technology had been developed before— notably by the Soviet Union during the Cold War— but was never viable for commercial production.
“ I knew it could work,” Thalheimer says.“ The math worked. The physics worked. I knew I could sell it, too, because I had done all the market analysis at that point.”
Klinker signed on, and they made their first pitch in late 2020 to the individuals who could make or break the project: their romantic partners. Klinker had been married to his wife, Brittany, for all of two weeks, and Thalheimer was dating Lindsey, whom
104 RHODE ISLAND MONTHLY I OCTOBER 2025