Boat rental platform Tubber has the tide with it

For years, Tubber has been the undisputed market leader in the Netherlands. Meanwhile, the Groningen-based scale-up is ready to conquer the rest of the world as well. 'Our ultimate goal is to make a sailing vacation on blue water accessible to everyone.'

Tubber had already been operating on a small scale outside its home country for some time. Because yes, as the market leader in the Netherlands, there is always room to grow elsewhere. 'Just not to the extent we want and are able to achieve,' says the boat rental platform's founder Anne de Vries. 'Partly thanks to a growth funding from the NOM it is now possible to utilize our potential and accelerate our scaling up to foreign countries'.

Tubber connects professional lessors as charter companies with people who want to rent a sailing yacht, catamaran or powerboat. The booking platform is sometimes called an Airbnb for boat rentals. But that comparison does not prove to be entirely accurate. 'In our offering you will not encounter boats from private owners,' CEO Tessa de Vries explains. 'We only work with professional lessors who, for example in case of technical problems, can provide expert assistance or quickly offer a good alternative. In other words: we want people to be able to enjoy a boating vacation to the fullest. Without worries, to be precise. With a private boat, that's always a bit of a wait and see.'

Tessa grew up as the daughter of an entrepreneur. As a child, she watched her father's work with admiration and wonder. Building something independently and being able to make your own choices. Yes, that seemed appealing to her. Yet she spent the first years of her working life in paid employment. 'Then you notice that having entrepreneurial blood can be quite frustrating,' says Tessa. 'That you have to do things you don't always support. I struggled with that at times.

Zeiljachthuren.nl was a success almost from the very first moment. The number of users and affiliated partners grew rapidly. Only: it could not scale up. 'The site ran on software that we rented from another company,' Anne explains. 'If we came up with something new, it had to be implemented through that software company. That started to chafe and got in the way of our international growth ambitions. At one point we had to sail a yacht back from Ibiza to Mallorca for a client. During that trip, we figured everything out to come up with a powerful and scalable platform. Back in Mallorca, we followed through and Tubber was born.

In the early years, transactions and other administrative processes were mainly done manually. As the number of customers increased, this logically became too cumbersome and time-consuming. And so a considerable degree of automation was undertaken. 'In the high level of automation now also lies largely Tubber's strength,' says Tessa. 'Along with our service, aftersales and presales, of course. Like us, our customers, mostly people between 30 and 60 years old, value personal contact. They like being able to pick up the phone for questions about a luxury product like a sailing yacht, for example. You don't have to call, of course, but if you do, we always answer.'

As mentioned, Tubber has become the market leader in the Netherlands. Just a few years ago, the company was ready to spread its wings internationally. Corona threw a spanner in the works. 'G-Force Capital had just come on board as an investor at the time,' Tessa looks back. 'We were really in the starting blocks. Yet the corona period also brought us a lot of good things. We were forced to automate our processes even smarter. At the same time, we worked very hard to further optimize the scalability of the platform. Instead of putting our plan on hold, we put it back on the table and tried to make it even better.

The efforts did not go unnoticed. In early 2023, G-Force Capital and Move Fast Ventures, together with investor Marnix van der Ploeg, who was closely involved in Booking.com's international success, decided to make a follow-on investment. 'This laid a great foundation for rapid international growth,' says Tessa. 'We immediately thought: this is the moment to approach NOM for a capital injection. NOM once helped us make our business plan investor-ready. The contact has always remained. We are true northerners and knew that NOM suited our way of doing business very well. Ambitious, but from an open and down-to-earth culture.'