Voly announced on 24 August that it had bought Oceanskies, a Guernsey crewing company and registration agent. It is the fourth company Voly has taken since 2023, and it puts the contracts of more than 10,000 seafarers inside one group.
Neither side gave a price. AshGrove Capital, a European fund of about €1 billion that lends to software businesses, provided senior secured financing for the purchase. The size of that facility was not disclosed either.
The platform and the crewing agent
Voly started in 2016 and runs from Cheadle, just outside Manchester, with offices in Guernsey, Southampton, Malta, Barcelona and Fort Lauderdale. Its software covers multi-currency yacht accounting, international payments and currency conversion, charter and APA administration, refit project management, and crew payroll. The company says more than 1,700 vessels use it and the group employs over 200 people. The controlling shareholder since February 2021 is Magenta Partners, a British private equity firm, and every acquisition since has been made under its control.
Oceanskies was founded in 2013 by Duncan Swanson, Adrian Ogier and Tom Becker. It works out of Guernsey, Jersey, Malta, the UK and Dubai, registers yachts and aircraft, and holds employment contracts for roughly 5,000 crew. Its own app, CrewMate, tracks employment and pay.
The two crew businesses merge: Oceanskies clients move under Voly Crew. What happens to the Oceanskies name is left open in the announcement, as is the question of who runs the combined division. The graphic released with the news reads "NOW VOLY CREW", which points one way, and there is precedent — Voly bought Voyonic Crewing in September 2024 and renamed it Voly Crew.
Four deals in three years
| Deal | When | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Pinpoint Works | February 2023 | Task management for newbuild and refit — captain, owner, yard and contractors on one list |
| Voyonic Crewing | September 2024 | Seafarer payroll, crew travel and rotations; renamed Voly Crew |
| Workrest | December 2024 | Work and rest hours, leave, overtime, visas, compliance tracking |
| Oceanskies | August 2026 | Crew employment, payroll, yacht and aircraft registration |
Every one of them covers the document flow around a yacht: the task lists, the payrolls, the rest hours, the registrations. Pinpoint Works was built by a superyacht captain who had run out of patience with spreadsheets. Workrest, founded in 2017, tracks the rest hours a crew member is legally entitled to.
What the 10,000 figure counts
It counts employment contracts. Voly Crew is the legal employer of those seafarers, runs their payroll across jurisdictions, puts them on the tax and social security rolls and tracks their rest hours and compliance; finding people work belongs to crew placement agencies, a separate business. So the 10,000 are seafarers whose employment sits with one group — roughly 5,000 from Oceanskies plus the existing Voly Crew base.
Ian Flanagan, who founded Voly and still runs it, framed it as nothing changing today and everything changing tomorrow. "Nothing changes for Oceanskies' clients today," he said. "What changes is what becomes possible tomorrow — crew employment and registration expertise backed by a genuine technology platform, and one company that an owner or manager can hold accountable for the whole experience rather than one slice of it."
Duncan Swanson, who co-founded Oceanskies thirteen years ago, said this was the right moment to join a larger business and that clients keep the specialist attention they had, "and now the technology and investment to go with it."
Bought on borrowed money
Voly buys with debt. Palatine lent it £2 million of growth credit to take Voyonic in 2024; AshGrove financed Oceanskies in 2026. Behind both sits Magenta, which took control in 2021.
That is a debt-funded roll-up under private equity ownership, a familiar shape in software and a newer one in yachting. Tom Matthews, a partner at Magenta, called Oceanskies the most significant of the four and cited a "high-quality recurring revenue base" without giving a number. Neither company publishes revenue. Flanagan says there are "further acquisitions in the pipeline", which is a stated intention with no fifth deal announced.
What it changes for owners and for crew
Voly's case for all this rests on figures the company supplies and nobody has checked independently: building, running, refitting and chartering yachts accounting for €30–40 billion a year worldwide, with specialist software reaching fewer than one yacht in five. Most boats, on that account, still run on spreadsheets and single-purpose tools while the regulatory load climbs — the MLC labour convention, STCW certification, anti-money-laundering rules, IMO and EU emissions reporting.
For an owner or a management company the sales argument is one supplier instead of five, and one contract to enforce when something goes wrong. The cost is dependence on a single vendor for accounting, payments, payroll and compliance at once, in a market where the alternatives keep getting bought. Praxis, a wealth-management group, took Guernsey's Sarnia Yachts in July 2023 — same islands, same services, different kind of buyer.
For crew the shift is quieter. Move between yachts and the employer on the contract may well be the same holding company either way. Rest hours, leave, overtime, pay and visa records increasingly live in one system belonging to one group, which makes them easier to check and easier to hold.
A back office nobody outside the industry thinks about is being assembled into a platform. Whoever ends up owning it will know, on any given day, who is working on a large share of the world's yachts and what they are paid.
Photo: Voly / IBI. Source: IBI.
