Congratulations to Foil Drive, named Beyond Borders Business of the Year at the 2026 South Australian Premier's Business and Export Awards.
Foil Drive invented Foil Assist, a retrofit electric kit for hydrofoils, engineered and assembled in Adelaide. According to the awards, more than 80 per cent of its revenue now comes from offshore, across more than 40 countries and over 300 dealers. It grew from a garage shed to a 38-person international business in five years.
That is a hardware story, and the credit is Foil Drive's. We are proud of the small part we play in it.
Where we come in
Every Foil Drive rider sets up their kit through the Foil Drive app, which we design and build. The app talks to the drive, the battery and the remote over Bluetooth. It recognises the rider's exact unit, writes the right configuration, and lets them pick a power mode or adjust boost in plain language.
When a product sells in 40 countries, nobody can drive out to fix a setting. The app has to get a rider from the box to the water on their own, often on a beach with no signal.
The hard part came first
Foil Drive's motor controller had no public documentation for its Bluetooth protocol. So before we designed a single screen, we proved we could talk to it: in our 2023 technical review we set a Foil Drive motor to 2,000 RPM from a phone.
That test became a prototype, and the prototype became the app. Nothing was thrown away.
Software for a global product
An export business needs the product experience to work without the founders in the room. For Foil Drive, the app is part of that experience. It carries firmware updates to riders, shows them battery health, and keeps every unit inside safe limits, wherever it is ridden.
Read the full story in our Foil Drive case study.
Congratulations again to the whole Foil Drive team.
