At this year’s Mediterranean Superyacht Forum in Palma, the Innovation Exchange Session, hosted by Yachting Ventures, brought eight companies to the stage across four categories: AI & digitalisation, offshore operations, onshore operations, and sustainability.

The challenges they addressed ranged from charter booking friction and AI-powered weather routing to crew nervous system regulation and propulsion architecture. But beneath the variety, a single theme ran through every pitch: the industry's greatest inefficiencies are as much technical problems as human ones.

Jack Molyneux, founder of IDOSY

AI & digitalisation

Jack Molyneux, founder of IDOSY, opened with a provocation: a single slide showing the endpoint of the digital customer journey in superyacht chartering. It was an inquiry form. “The online journey ends here,” he told the audience. “And then you wait. You wait for availability. You wait for pricing. You wait for contracts.”

He argued that while luxury consumers can already book private aviation, villas and high-end experiences online, yacht charter remains stubbornly analogue at the decisive moment. He acknowledged excellent brokers deliver exceptional experiences, but was clear about the structural problem: “We are only positively engaging with around 10 per cent of the ultra-high-net-worth individuals who could realistically afford to participate in our market. And there has to be a reason for that.”

IDOSY’s answer is live pricing and live availability, reducing the journey from search to booking to minutes. The platform launched at the show.

Fabien Cousteix of YachtMind used his time less to pitch a product than to reframe the AI conversation entirely. “ChatGPT is just a very small fraction of what AI can really do for our businesses,” he said.

YachtMind is building AI-powered systems for yacht operations, business intelligence and digital visibility, helping brands understand how they appear across large language models while also developing AI agents capable of supporting maintenance, provisioning and operational workflows.

Dale Rogers of TowPro

Offshore operations

Dale Rogers of TowPro arrived with a sharp reframe. “The reality on the bridge is very different to the dream,” he said. “It’s breakage. It’s lost toys. It’s adventurous guests who take a jet ski a little too far.”

TowPro began five years ago, tackling tender towing (around one-third of insurance claims involve tenders being lost) and has since expanded into full fleet oversight, tracking every asset around a vessel: tenders, jet skis, e-foils, crew and guests.

Integrating hardware from Garmin, Globalstar and AirTag into a single chart plotter interface, the platform now serves more than 100 vessels, including Apollo, Ulysses and Five Oceans.

Basile Rochut, co-founder and CTO of Marine Weather Intelligence (MWI), addressed a related challenge. Extreme weather events are increasing in frequency and severity, and conventional forecast models are often ill-equipped to model them.

MWI - co-founded with Christian Dumard, one of France’s most recognised offshore weather routers with 30 years of experience across the Vendée Globe and The Ocean Race - embeds that expertise directly into AI-powered routing software. Rather than presenting a single forecast scenario, the platform models weather uncertainty across all plausible conditions. Working with the European Space Agency, it also uses satellite imagery and computer vision to detect developing squalls and high wind gusts before they appear in standard forecasts.

Libby Pickett, founder of Calm Crew Coaching

Onshore operations

Mia Lilienthal, CEO of Zeafarer Yacht Intelligence, built her pitch around a simple observation: the people who use superyacht technology are not the people it is built for.

“Most superyacht technology is intentionally built in silos,” she said, “Crew are expected to navigate multiple disconnected systems to manage a single vessel”. Zeafarer’s unified fleet intelligence platform consolidates everything into one interface, customised by role, and integrates with existing AI models so that captains troubleshooting an engine can get a reliable answer grounded in the vessel’s actual operational history.

Libby Pickett, founder of Calm Crew Coaching, reframed crew wellbeing as a business-critical issue with hard numbers to back it up. Junior crew turnover runs at 37 per cent annually. One in five crew members experience stress, anxiety and loneliness, and 50 per cent have considered leaving the industry. “This is not a skill problem,” she said. “This is a nervous system problem.”

Her programme - grounded in Polyvagal Theory and vagal nerve regulation, delivered online and deployable fleet-wide - launches in June 2026. “The superyacht industry takes exceptional care of its vessels,” she told the room. “It’s time we took the same care of our crew.”

Lucas Haitzmann of Sarno Industries

Sustainability

Lucas Haitzmann of Sarno Industries opened with the Atlantic row that broke three world records and the insight it gave him into inefficiency at sea. Conventional combustion engines, he argued, waste 60 to 70 per cent of the fuel they consume in heat, vibration and emissions. Sarno’s new propulsion architecture is designed as a drop-in replacement: same fuel infrastructure, 30 per cent more range, 90 per cent fewer emissions, zero vibration. Three patents are pending, with a team drawn from McLaren, Volvo Trucks and Rivian behind it.

David Mossman of  Sertec Marine tackled lightning - specifically, why the industry is still inviting it in. “A lightning strike on a vessel isn’t just a lightning strike - it’s a systems failure,” Mossman explained. As climate change increases storm intensity, Sertec is rethinking lightning protection, aiming to prevent strikes from impacting vessels in the first place rather than simply managing damage after impact. It is 99 per cent effective, approved by Lloyd’s, recognised by RINA and in use within NATO. 

Gabbi Richardson, founder, Yachting Ventures

A more connected future

What Palma made visible is that yachting's next chapter will be assembled through smarter systems, more connected operations and a more honest reckoning with the people at the centre of the industry. 

The companies that took the stage made a compelling case that the pace of change is accelerating and that the future is already being built.

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