Wider Yachts

From Pershing to Wider: Tilli Antonelli's New Formula

Wider was founded in 2010 by Tilli Antonelli, the naval architect who had built and led Pershing into one of the Ferretti Group's flagship performance-boat brands before leaving to start his own yard. He set out to do something Pershing had not: rethink how much of a boat's volume actually goes to the people on board rather than to engines and tankage. The first result was the Wider 42, an open day-cruiser whose expanding cockpit doubled its usable deck space at anchor, a trick that became the brand's signature move long before it reached superyacht size.

That thinking scaled up fast. Wider added the compact Wider 32 tender and then, within a few years, opened a dedicated Superyacht Division at a yard in Ancona to build hulls far larger than anything the company had attempted before. Ownership changed hands along the way, Malaysian investor Exa Limited took a 50 percent stake in 2012 and bought the rest of the company five years later, and Wider passed to the holding company W-Fin Sarl in 2019, but the engineering direction Antonelli set, diesel-electric propulsion and space won back from machinery, stayed constant through every change of owner.

Electrifying Yachting: the Current Range

Wider's design centre, Centro Stile, and its shipyard now sit together in Fano, and the company markets itself under the line Electrifying Yachting, a direct continuation of the serial hybrid diesel-electric system it first put to sea on the Wider 150. The current range spans the WiderCat 92 catamaran and superyacht projects including the Wider 165, with newer 52 and 64 metre projects and the Moonflower 72 continuing the same brief of hybrid propulsion paired with unusually large open-plan and beach-facing volumes.

The company positions every model, from the smallest tender to its largest superyacht projects, around the same claim: low noise, reduced emissions and a stated ambition to reach fully electric propulsion across the range. That claim rests directly on the reputation the Wider 150 Genesi built in 2015 and 2016, when Wider was still a young, single-yard builder proving a genuinely new powertrain rather than an established name refining one.