A new shipyard has appeared in New York with an unusual ambition: to take the kind of multihull technology normally reserved for record-breaking ocean racers and put it into a production sailing yacht you could actually live aboard. The company is VMG — Velocity Made Good — and its first model is the VMG 53.
The boat is a sixteen-metre luxury performance trimaran, and the first hull is already under construction. VMG says the build is on schedule for a launch and delivery in January 2027.
Racing pedigree, cruising brief
The naval architecture and structural engineering come from VPLP Design, the French studio behind some of the fastest ocean-racing trimarans ever built. That heritage is the whole point. VMG's pitch is that a trimaran can carry genuine ocean-racing performance and still offer the comfort, safety and easy handling of a premium cruiser — without forcing the owner to choose between them.
The interior is by Christophe Chedal Anglay, with engineering and technical development handled by Thorne Yacht Design. The composite hull is being built by Evolution Marine Manufacturing in Cape Town, South Africa, where the project has grown from concept to construction over the past three years.
That length is the only dimension VMG has put on the record. Beam, displacement, sail area, mast height, speed, cabin count and price remain unpublished — and the full press release carries no spec sheet either. A fuller reveal is expected around the middle of July.
Two crewmates and a conversation
The company was started by Michael Schwartz and Karl Reed, who met as crewmates in an offshore race off New England. After a hard passage, the talk turned to the boat they would build if nothing had to be compromised — speed, comfort, safety, ease of handling, all at once. That conversation became VMG.
Schwartz, the founder and principal, brings more than twenty-five years in product development, manufacturing and commercialisation, having built and scaled businesses across the industrial, food-production and cycling sectors. Reed is a professional captain, delivery skipper and multihull specialist, and his hands-on experience of what offshore owners actually need shapes the design brief.
The name says a lot about how they think. In sailing, velocity made good is the measure of how efficiently a yacht turns raw speed into real progress toward where it is going. The founders frame it as their philosophy: the most effective route forward, on the water and as a business.
Michael Schwartz, Founder and Principal of VMG:“From the beginning, our goal has been to create the yacht we wanted to own ourselves. We believe that we have the unique opportunity to combine world-class design, practical cruising capability and true sailing performance in a way that hasn't been achieved before in a production trimaran. Through the VMG 53 and our future models, we aim to make the most cutting-edge trimaran technology accessible to all.
”
The gap they're aiming at
There is a real space in the market between the two extremes of multihull sailing. At one end sit racing trimarans — blisteringly fast, spartan, demanding. At the other, heavy cruising catamarans — roomy and stable, but slow. VMG wants the VMG 53 to land in between: a fast, easily handled, liveable bluewater boat for cruising couples and families who don't want to give up performance to get comfort.
The harder part isn't making the boat fast. It's making it in series. Cutting-edge trimarans are almost always one-off custom builds. VMG's stated goal is to make that technology accessible through serial production — and the 53 is the first test of whether that case can be made.
Whether the boat delivers on all of that is something the numbers will eventually have to answer, and those numbers aren't public yet. For now, what VMG has is a clear thesis, a serious design and build team, and a first hull taking shape in a Cape Town shed. The rest arrives in January 2027.
Renders: VMG / VPLP Design. Construction photography: Richard Langdon. Founder portraits: Jeremiah G Smith. Source: VMG.
