Per-Arne Hjelmborn, Sweden’s ambassador to Spain, arrives early at Sotogrande, an upscale harbour on the southern coast of Andalucía. Standing on the quay in the soft morning sunlight, dapper and tall in a suit, tie and sunglasses, he says, “We’re about to set a milestone. We will be connecting Africa with Europe [in a new way]. This is a great day for Swedish technology.”

Hjelmborn is about to board Elina, the fully electric hydrofoil boat that is attempting to set a world record for being the first all-electric vessel to traverse the Mediterranean. The plan is to graze past the Rock of Gibraltar, dock at the Spanish city of Ceuta on the African continent for a quick charge of the boat’s battery and then return to the Spanish mainland in the afternoon.

Elina is a C-8 hydrofoil, a nimble and lightweight 28ft (8.5-metre) leisure boat built from carbon fibre that comes with battery technology and upholstery designed by car manufacturer Polestar. The boat, which is built and developed by Swedish firm Candela, can reach speeds of 30 knots (55.6km/h) and travel 40 nautical miles (74km) on a single charge. Candela’s crossing of the Med is not just about breaking records; it’s also a charm offensive. This will introduce the technology behind the firm’s larger hydrofoil, the P-12, which can take 30 passengers and is already running a successful commuter service on Stockholm’s waterways. If Gustav Hasselskog, Candela’s founder and CEO, gets his way, the two million people who travel between Algeciras on the Spanish mainland and Ceuta every year on large, polluting ferries will, in the near future, have the option to board Candela’s P-12 instead. “We’re proving that it is possible to revolutionise transport at sea,” says Hasselskog, as he climbs aboard Elina.

Since launching Candela in 2014, Hasselskog has added more funding (€35m raised in the latest round), staff (currently 220), an HQ in Stockholm and a factory outside the Swedish capital. The company will soon inaugurate a second factory in Poland. He has sold the P-12 to 10 countries so far, including Germany, New Zealand, the US and Saudi Arabia, where the hydrofoil will frequent the canals of the futuristic new megacity, The Line, once it’s built.

The potential to electrify sea traffic is there and the market for smaller, faster and cleaner vessels is wide open and untapped. “These sea lanes have existed for thousands of years but we’ve lost sight of their potential,” says Hasselskog. “Ferries are expensive and dirty. We’re paving the way for a new zero-emissions mode of public transport.”

Hasselskog is hopeful that his hydrofoils will appear everywhere, from Mumbai to New York, and believes that people on the Costa del Sol would be quick to jump on a P-12 between, for instance, Málaga and Marbella, cities that can often only be reached via traffic choked roads.

“We have a product that delivers a fast, clean and reliable alternative to clunky, dirty ferries,” he says. “We also have no competitors.” Hasselskog steers Elina out of the harbour and sets the bow towards the open sea. Candela boats run on a software system similar to that found in fighter jets; it stabilises an essentially unstable craft using ultrasound sensors that gather information about wave movements, adjusting the foils accordingly for the boat to stay on course. Lowering the foils into the water, the CEO then pushes to full throttle.

Cresting the waves alongside Elina is a fossil-fuel-powered speedboat, which struggles to keep up with the C-8, with its foils that lift the craft about half a metre above the water’s surface. She’s silent, fast and stable – unlike the speedboat, which smashes hard onto the waves, roars and smells of gasoline.

Except for the fog that envelops the harbour entrance at Ceuta, the trip over the Mediterranean runs smoothly – and we’re accompanied by schools of tiny dolphins. At 25 knots (46km/h), it takes about an hour to travel between continents. Upon arrival in Ceuta, Hasselskog’s PR manager, Mikael Mahlberg, who rode in the speedboat next to Elina, shouts to his boss, “We have a world record!” and gives a thumbs up.

As Hasselskog moors the hydrofoil, he and his team are surrounded by a scrum of journalists and TV crews, who are there to record the historic crossing, and are then greeted by dignitaries including Karim Bulaix García-Valiño, president of Ceuta’s chamber of commerce. “Ceuta is reinventing itself,” says García-Valiño. “We want to be smart and green. Candela fits right into that.” This sentiment is echoed by Ceuta’s diminutive mayor-president, Juan Jesús Vivas, who expresses his enthusiasm once Hasselskog shows him a reel of the P-12 cruising Lake Mälaren in Stockholm in more explicit terms. “Es de puta madre,” he says, which roughly means, “It’s awesome.”

The man who is most likely going to operate a fleet of Candela P-12s between Ceuta and the Spanish mainland is Manuel Gómez Guiterrez-Torrenova, the president and CEO of Avangreen, a multinational green-energy infrastructure firm that recently opened a solar-panel park in Ceuta harbour. “We can plug in the boats to charge right here,” says Guiterrez-Torrenova. “Millions of people visit Andalusia every year but many don’t realise how close they are to Africa. There’s a big gap in the market. These people could easily pop over to Ceuta on a Candela boat.”

To understand how a small Swedish firm could become a world leader in the electric hydrofoil market, you have to understand its founder. Hasselskog’s core team describes his leadership style as open and hands-on. He certainly looks the part of a technology entrepreneur: black T-shirt emblazoned with the company’s logo, shorts and a Candela cap. He also speaks like one when he says that he is ready to dominate the world’s waterways.

The 53-year-old, who has an engineering degree, is quintessentially Swedish, hiding his intelligence and entrepreneurial prowess behind a measured and humble attitude. And, judging from the boyish glint in his eyes, Hasselskog retains the same curiosity for research and development that he had as a young man when he would tinker with anything that he could disassemble and reassemble – then improve.

That is further confirmed when he talks about the beginnings of Candela. “I had achieved all that I wanted,” he says. “I had the corner office, the money, the nice car. But I realised that no one cared about what I did. Nobody would remember me for my corner office.”

Hasselskog, who talks with great affection about his two teenage sons – “They don’t take after me,” he says with a laugh, sounding content. “One paints, the other makes music” – explains how he stumbled across the idea of launching a company that makes electric hydrofoils. “I’d spend €50 on petrol to take my sons in our motorboat from our summer house in the Stockholm archipelago to the nearest kiosk in town to buy ice cream,” he says. “Those ice-cream runs were far too expensive. I had to do something about that.” Now, just over a decade later, Hasselskog knows that he did the right thing when he spent part of his savings on renderings of the first boat and embarked on the schlep to find investors, sketches in hand. Out of 90 venture capitalists, all but two turned down meeting him, though they too ultimately said thanks but no thanks. It took investment from Christer von de Burg, a Swedish rare and antique bookseller in London, to get things going. “Hasselskog is an inventor,” says Von de Burg over dinner with representatives from Málaga’s local government. “He is passionate about his project. He gets things done. He’s the real deal.”

That assessment proved wise. Though Candela’s first prototype failed to lift out of the water and brought the team back to the drawing board, the next iteration, the C-7, worked – and Hasselskog’s doggedness and belief in his product has delivered a clean way to travel by sea. “We flew across the Mediterranean today,” he says back at the quay at Sotogrande, looking relaxed and happy. “That has never been done before.”