For generations, South Florida’s marine contractors have mostly landed jobs the old-fashioned way, knocking on hulls at the marina.Boatwork wants to bring that world online.
Founded by Jacob Ruytenbeek, Boatwork is building what he describes as a Yelp for the marine industry, a curated directory that connects boat owners with contractors, paired with tools that bring those same contractors online.
The idea grew out of a personal problem. While running his previous company, Sailplan, Ruytenbeek needed fiberglass repair work done on a test boat and found the marine industry’s information scattered across Facebook threads, with no way to tell a reliable contractor from a risky one.
“I had to go to Facebook, where I found 58 different recommendations that all pointed in different directions,” Ruytenbeek said. “I didn’t know how to make sense of who’s who in this space.”
That gap matters more in South Florida than almost anywhere else. The Tri-County region of Broward, Miami-Dade, and Palm Beach generated $18.5 billion in total economic output in 2022 and supported 141,860 jobs, according to theEconomic Impact Study of the Recreational Marine Industry.
Ruytenbeek’s read on that market shaped how Boatwork charges for it. He sees a marine contractor’s labor as the part of the business that creates all the value, while marketing, back office work, and lead generation are overhead that adds cost without adding value. That thinking led Boatwork to stop charging for leads altogether, lowering the barrier for contractors to join and display a verified profile. The platform now lists more than 10,000 of them.
From there, contractors can pay for two additional products.Presence builds and maintains a website and social media presence automatically, pulling from a contractor’s existing profile and posting on their behalf.Boatwork Assist is an AI agent that acts as a virtual team member, drafting estimates, managing bookings, and handling other back-office work. The company has also built an AI persona named Marina Morgan to help contractors who have little to no online presence get discovered.
For Ruytenbeek, that digital gap is an existential issue for the industry, not just an inconvenience. AI tools like Claude and ChatGPT are changing how people search for services, he said, and marine businesses without a digital footprint are invisible to that layer entirely.
“The way Claude and ChatGPT models work is you have to have a digital presence for it to know about you,” he said. “The vast majority of marine businesses today just have no electronic presence whatsoever.”
The stakes of getting owners matched with the right contractor go beyond visibility, though. Ruytenbeek points to boat electrification as a preview of what’s coming. More boats are running on lithium battery systems, which cannot be mixed with older lead-acid setups the way owners might expect. Many contractors aren’t yet equipped to work safely with the newer systems, he said, and the mismatch is causing fires. Getting boat owners to a qualified contractor, in his view, can keep them in the industry rather than souring them on electrification altogether.
Boatwork has been bootstrapped to date and is preparing to raise a seed round later this year to fund expansion beyond South Florida, including early interest from contractors in Europe. The long-term goal, Ruytenbeek said, is straightforward. He wants boat owners to think of Boatwork the way they think of Yelp, the first place they turn to find someone to trust with their boat.
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Zané van Greuning
I’m a South Africa-born, Miami-based marketing leader and writer with a passion for stories at the intersection of technology and entrepreneurship. I particularly enjoy covering ocean tech and the innovators reshaping energy, finance, and infrastructure. Always open for pitches, reach me on LinkedIn.
Latest posts by Zané van Greuning (see all)
- Boatwork wants to transform South Florida’s $18.5B marine industry- August 12, 2026
- The RRTH Innovation Center opens applications to support resilient infrastructure startups- July 23, 2026
- Sealor secures $1.1M to tackle South Florida’s flooding problem- July 2, 2026
