Building the operating system for on-demand maritime experiences
Sigla partnered with Anchor to design, build, and scale a two-sided marketplace spanning guests, boat owners, captains, and maritime operations.
Marketplace · Payments · Compliance · Logistics · AI · Growth
- Industry: Travel, Hospitality, Marketplaces
- Founded: 2016
- Fleet size: 7,000+ yachts
- Markets: U.S. coastal cities
Anchor is a yacht and boat rental marketplace connecting guests, licensed captains, and yacht owners to deliver five-star charter experiences in top coastal destinations across the U.S.
Guests can browse and book from 7,000+ yachts with professional captains, while owners use Anchor to keep their boats booked and earn more — with Anchor’s platform facilitating client communication, payments, and logistics.
The Opportunity
Anchor saw an opportunity to modernize how on-water experiences are discovered, booked, and operated — unlocking a fragmented, offline industry through a trusted, scalable digital platform.
The Challenges
1. Establish trust in a high-risk, high-value marketplace. Guests, captains, and owners all needed confidence — across safety, payments, and reliability — before transacting.
2. Design for scale across multiple stakeholders. The platform had to serve guests, boat owners, captains, and internal operations without creating friction or manual overhead.
3. Operationalize compliance and logistics at the platform level. Payments, contracts, scheduling, and maritime requirements needed to function as a unified system, not disconnected tools.
Our Role
Platform Engineering
Full-stack development across web, mobile, and backend systems.
Data Architecture
Unified marketing, analytics, and booking data into a single model.
AI & Automation
Automated SEO, dynamic ad optimization, and pricing intelligence.
Leadership
Fractional CTO/CPO/COO roles, team hiring, product guidance.
Scalable Booking Platform
Sigla designed and engineered Anchor’s core operating platform — connecting discovery, booking, operations, and compliance into a single, scalable system.
- Guest experience: Search, discover, and book with confidence
- Owner experience: List assets, manage availability, and coordinate charters
- Captain experience: Accept trips, manage schedules, and stay compliant
- Operations backbone: Automated payments, contracts, compliance, and support
Modern Data Lakehouse
To support real-time bookings, operational oversight, and future AI-driven capabilities, Sigla designed a modern data lakehouse that unifies product, operational, and financial data into a single source of truth.
- Unified data across the marketplace: Events, transactions, and operational data from guests, owners, captains, and internal systems flow into a centralized, analytics-ready foundation.
- Real-time visibility and decision support: The lakehouse enables near real-time insights into bookings, utilization, revenue, and operational performance — supporting faster decisions across growth and operations.
- Scalable foundation for automation and AI: By structuring and standardizing data at the platform level, Anchor is positioned to layer in automation, forecasting, and AI-driven optimizations as the business scales.
- Built for scale, governance, and reliability: The architecture balances flexibility with governance — ensuring data quality, security, and long-term maintainability as volume and complexity increase.
Applied AI as shipped capability, with a clear expansion path
With a unified data foundation in place, Sigla partnered with Anchor to deploy applied AI and automation across the platform — shipping production AI capabilities today while laying the groundwork for more advanced, personalized experiences.
- AI-powered content generation for growth: An AI-driven content engine dynamically generates and optimizes landing page content, supporting faster go-to-market, improved SEO coverage, and scalable experimentation across regions and experiences.
- Operational automation at scale: Automation embedded across core workflows reduces manual intervention in bookings, payments, communications, and operational handoffs.
- AI-driven discovery and recommendations (in progress): Building on the platform’s data foundation, Sigla is actively developing an AI-driven recommendation agent to improve discovery and personalization.
- Intelligent insights and decision support: Applied intelligence gives Anchor’s team clearer visibility into performance, utilization, and operational patterns.
- Human-in-the-loop by design: Automation augments human decision-making rather than replacing it, ensuring reliability, transparency, and operational control as complexity increases.
Business Impact
Through a combination of platform design, engineering, data architecture, and AI, Sigla helped Anchor achieve measurable business outcomes. The result is a company that can grow faster without growing headcount at the same rate, because its core systems and intelligence are built to scale.
Ready to build your AI-powered platform?
Sigla partners with founders and companies to build durable platforms at the intersection of product, operations, and applied intelligence — turning complexity into competitive advantage.
Let’s talk