Three co-founders who lived the problem before building the solution. A team assembled to make professional yacht management simpler, faster, and more reliable — for every captain and manager who never signed up to spend their evenings on spreadsheets.
Our Scyllastar story was born out of frustration — the kind that only comes from living a problem every day.
Picture this: a 50-metre superyacht, fresh teak decks, a chef trained at a three-star restaurant, a crew of twelve in pressed whites. The guests sip champagne on the aft deck somewhere between Monaco and Portofino. Everything looks effortless.
Below deck, the captain is hunched over a laptop, rebuilding last month’s expense report from scratch. Again.
This is the dirty secret of the yachting industry. The vessels are worth tens of millions. The clients expect — and receive — five-star hospitality. But behind the scenes, the people running these operations are drowning in spreadsheets, chasing paper receipts across three currencies, manually tracking crew certificates that may or may not have expired, and assembling financial reports that take days to produce and are outdated the moment they’re sent.
It’s not for lack of talent. The captains, managers, and crews who run these boats are exceptional professionals. They are navigators, safety officers, logistics coordinators, and hospitality directors all at once. What they are not — and never signed up to be — is accountants wrestling with software built for someone else entirely.
The tools that existed were a bad joke. Generic accounting platforms that had never heard of an APA account. Enterprise maritime systems designed for shipping companies with dedicated IT departments and six-figure implementation budgets. And everywhere in between: Excel. Mountains of Excel.
The one solution that came closest to addressing the problem was almost comical in its execution: a proprietary software that required a physical Mac Mini to be installed aboard the vessel, bolted somewhere in the engine room or tucked behind the nav station, with no cloud access, no remote updates, and a price tag starting at €15,000 a year. If you wanted to check a report from the dock, you couldn’t. If the hardware failed mid-charter, you were on your own. In 2017, while the rest of the software world was moving everything to the cloud, yachting was still shipping computers onto boats.
Meanwhile, every other industry with real operational complexity had eventually found software that understood it — software built by people who had lived the problem, not just observed it from a distance. Finance had Bloomberg. Construction had Procore. Restaurants had Toast.
Yachting hadn’t. Not yet.
That’s the gap Scyllastar was built to close.
Our first founder is a professional captain with 3,000 tonnage experience. For years, he watched the same scene repeat itself across every yacht he worked on: talented, dedicated professionals spending hours every week on administration instead of doing the job they actually loved. Receipts piling up. Financial reports rebuilt from scratch every month. Crew certificates expiring without warning. Security drills forgotten in the chaos of a busy charter season.
He had tried everything the market offered. The generic tools didn’t understand maritime operations. The enterprise platforms were priced for shipowners, not for working captains managing a vessel on behalf of someone else. And the one software that claimed to solve it all required bolting a Mac Mini to the boat and hoping it survived the Atlantic crossing.
He knew the problem better than anyone. What he needed was someone who knew how to build the solution.
He found that person in 2017 — a software architect who had spent years designing the internals of Murex, one of the world’s most demanding capital markets platforms, used by hundreds of banks. He had built systems where a single logic error costs millions. He understood what serious financial software had to be: precise, fault-tolerant, and completely unforgiving of shortcuts.
What he saw in the yachting industry shocked him. The same financial operations he had spent his career hardening at institutional scale — multi-currency reconciliation, expense tracking, cash flow reporting — were being handled with spreadsheets, copy-pasted templates, and gut feeling. The gap wasn’t just inefficiency. It was a solved problem being ignored.
Together, they decided to build the tool they always wished existed. Cloud-native from day one. Designed for the people actually running vessels, not for the owners who rarely set foot on them. And priced so that a working captain or a small management company could actually afford it.
The third piece arrived the way the best collaborations do — through a shared past and a problem too compelling to walk away from.
Our CEO had built his career at the hardest end of financial software. As a Program Manager at Murex, he had coordinated the delivery of systems used by the world’s largest banks. Then as Director of a quantitative research team at HSBC, he had spent years leading mathematicians and engineers building models that had to be right — not approximately right, but provably, auditably, unambiguously right.
He is the kind of person who sees the architecture underneath the chaos. Who reads a broken process the way others read a broken sentence — immediately, instinctively, with a very clear idea of how to fix it.
He had known our software architect from the Murex years. Two people who had spent their careers solving hard problems at scale. When he heard what was being built at Scyllastar, he recognised the pattern immediately: a fragmented industry, skilled but underserved professionals, and a software gap hiding in plain sight.
He joined to bring what the early product needed most — structure, strategic clarity, and the hard-won discipline of turning a brilliant technical idea into something that earns trust at every touchpoint. As CEO, he makes sure Scyllastar doesn’t just work. It grows, it sharpens, and it keeps being built for the people who actually use it every day.
The first version of Scyllastar went into production in 2018. By 2024, the platform was managing twelve vessels for professional management companies across Europe — with clients reporting fleet growth of 50% without hiring a single additional person.
We are based in Paris. All data is hosted exclusively in the EU. And we have never stopped building alongside our clients — every major feature in Scyllastar was shaped by the people who use it every day.
We didn’t build Scyllastar for the industry. We built it with the people who run it.
