The first observation wasn't about boats. It was about a pattern: Uber, Airbnb, Kindred, each one had taken an asset sitting idle, built the trust layer around it, and turned an entire market on its head. Once you've noticed that pattern, you start seeing idle assets everywhere, and marinas are full of them, row after row of boats that barely leave the dock.
Ignacio López Martín isn't one of those owners. He takes his own boat out most weeks. But he and Soco Núñez de Cela, another lifelong sailor who spends her working life pushing brands past where they'd normally stop, were talking about boats one day when Soco put the question on the table: what if we did with boats what HomeExchange did with houses? She said it half as a crazy idea. Ignacio saw the opportunity immediately, and between them they landed on the actual gap. It's not only that people don't use the boats they own. It's that owning a boat still only gets you your usual stretch of water. Sail somewhere else in the world and you're back to chartering, an entire extra layer of cost stacked on top of what you're already paying to keep your own boat, for a vessel you'll only ever use once.
That's the gap The Seafolk is built to close: not “get people to use their boats more,” but “let people who already use their boats reach every other coastline, through boats other members already use just as well.”
Ignacio is an industrial engineer from Seville who decided the energy transition wouldn't be built from a spreadsheet. In 2019 he co-founded Cable Energía, an electric-vehicle fast-charging network operator across Spain and Portugal. In July 2022, Shell acquired the company outright, and Ignacio stayed on as CEO through the integration until the end of 2023. In 2025, Acciona Energía bought the business on from Shell.
From there, he moved on, and created Vida Sustainable Ventures, the platform he now uses to start, operate, and govern companies across energy, renewables, infrastructure, and software, a portfolio that today includes Eolinet Renovables, Capflex Energía, and several others alongside it. The Seafolk is the one that connects all of that back to his own life passion: the sea, and sailing.
A community built on handing over the keys to your boat doesn't get a second chance to explain itself. It has to feel exactly as trustworthy as it actually is, from the first word a member reads.
That's where Soco Núñez de Cela, co-founder alongside Ignacio, chips in. She's built a reputation for cutting through with bravery and clarity instead of budget, across global brands like Dolce Hotels & Resorts and Burger King, proving that a brand doesn't need to shout to be remembered, it needs to say something true and say it well. From there she moved to Deliverect, a unicorn company built on fast-paced environments and disruption, and has been pushing the brand further ever since. She brings that same instinct to The Seafolk as co-founder, alongside her ongoing role as Global CMO of Deliverect, which remains her main focus: build a brand that earns quiet confidence instead of chasing loud attention, in a space where the wrong tone could cost a member their trust before they've even signed up.
Both of them are disruptors by instinct, not just by job title, and both are co-founders, in equal parts. Ignacio has spent his career backing and building the ventures that replace an old, inefficient model with a better one. Soco has spent hers inside the companies that actually pulled it off. The Seafolk is what happens when that instinct turns toward the sea, and for now, it's the project both of them are building alongside their existing roles, right at the start of its own journey.
Neither of them started from a blank page on boat exchange itself, either. They'd both watched the earlier attempts at peer-to-peer boat swapping run into the same two walls every time. First, there was no real backing behind any of it: no insurance, so the entire arrangement rested on a handshake and hoping nothing went wrong. Second, it was never actually a community, just a series of one-to-one trades between two people whose calendars happened to line up. Find the right owner, on the right dates, or the whole thing fell through. It could never scale past a small circle of the most trusting, most experienced sailors, because it was never built to.
The Seafolk takes on both of those walls, and is straight about where each one stands. The community is the part that exists today: a worldwide membership to draw from, rather than a single swap partner whose calendar has to line up with yours. On the first wall we won't overstate anything. There is no policy in force today and no signed agreement with any insurer, which is exactly what our Terms say. That is why bareboat exchanges, where you sail another member's boat yourself, stay closed, while time aboard with the owner present and exchanges with a professional skipper are open.
The Seafolk isn't a chartering business, and it isn't the old boat-swap forums either. It's membership-based reciprocity, built the way Kindred and HomeExchange rebuilt home-sharing: identity checked by Stripe when you join, a licence checker that cross-references the credential you declare against the boat's flag, real conditions set by owners, and a conversation before anything is confirmed. The insurance layer is the piece still missing, and until it exists we say so plainly rather than let an owner assume otherwise.
Boat exchange isn't just a business idea to either of them. Ignacio and Soco are both sailors, and both carry the same dream: to sail around the world one day, one stretch of coastline at a time. With The Seafolk, they want every sailor to have the opportunity to dream, and explore other seas.
Join The Seafolk