With the help of AI and other tech, CEO Pat Kolek is leading the global company into a new era, from ‘Click & Buy’ to ‘Click & Boat’
Boats Group, a global leader in recreational boating marketplaces, is steering the centuries-old marine industry into the future with AI, data, and a firm anchor in Miami.
Under CEO Patrick Kolek, who took the helm in 2023, Boats Group, one of Miami’s larger tech employers, has accelerated its transformation from a connector of buyers and sellers into a full-service ecosystem for boat buyers, sellers, and owners. Its mission: To eliminate friction in a complicated buying process that Kolek says combines “the emotion of buying a supercar and the complexity of buying a house.”
Coming out of the pandemic as boat buying and selling industry-wide had slowed amid a glut of inventory, “this was a big moment for us,” Kolek explains in an interview with Refresh Miami. With AI coming onto the scene, Boats Group launched a more fully digital transformation up and down the boat buying and selling process under Kolek, a longtime investor in Boats Group and board member since 2020. Kolek has also held leadership roles at big marketplace companies including eBay, OLX and OfferUp.
Reimagining the boat buying experience
Boats Group was founded in 1996 and moved its headquarters to Miami in 2017. Today the company operates several of the world’s most trafficked digital marketplaces, including Boat Trader, YachtWorld, boats.com, and European platforms such as iNautia and Botentekoop. Together, these sites attract over 200 million visits a year and support more than 200,000 listings in more than 140 countries.
But behind the listings, the company is transforming the back-end experience, especially for sellers. AI tools now assist with photo enhancement. They also reorder image galleries based on click data, and build optimized listings via an AI-powered description generator. Algorithms sort and personalize listings for buyers based on preferences and behavior, delivering more relevant matches faster, and help verify potential buyers, filtering out the tire kickers. “And now you create a much better flywheel,” says Kolek.
This month alone, the company has launched an AI-powered listing builder, a market evaluation tool, and a virtual support agent. “There’s a bunch more coming around personalization of experiences for both buyers and sellers,” says Kolek. “I like to dream about what we’re going to build.”
Boats Group’s recent internal hackathon focusing on AI-driven tools yielded 25 new ideas, including boat valuation engines, image recognition, financing automation, and photo-to-video listing enhancements. Five are being fast-tracked for release this year.
As Boat Groups looks toward the future, AI and other technology will aid its transition to the next phase beyond connecting buyers and sellers. Boat rentals, maintenance, logistics, and marina storage could all be part of what Kolek calls the transition from Click & Buy” to “Click & Boat.”
Global growth with a Miami core
Since 2023, Boats Group has completed seven international acquisitions, extending its reach as boating brands globalize. From its Brickell headquarters, the company manages operations in both Miami and Barcelona, its two primary engineering hubs that “follow the sun.” Boats Group employs 300 globally, and about half of the team is in Miami.
Kolek, a self-described global nomad with past stints in various cities in Asia and Europe as well as San Francisco and New York, has embraced Miami and its tech community. “I’ve found Miami to be a very welcoming and community-oriented place,” Kolek says. “We’re not having any problem finding talent here in South Florida,” even Meta-level engineers, he adds.
The company’s summer internship program has grown from six students a few years ago to 26 students this year, and the interns are primarily from South Florida universities. Two recent hires were interns.
Kolek says Boats Group employs engineers, data analysts, business development, customer service and sales at its Miami headquarters. The company is currently hiring product managers, a product designer, a senior data analyst, senior software developers and a senior devops engineer.
Growth bucks the industry trend
Despite a stagnant U.S. market where annual boat sales have hovered around one million, Boats Group is growing, Kolek reports. While financials remain private, the company has seen about a 30% increase in lead volume over the past 12 months and more user engagement than ever before, he says. Over the past three years, its platforms generated 5 million leads and facilitated more than 315,000 sales.
Even in a higher-interest rate environment, nearly half of buyers are closing purchases within 90 days of initial contact. Notably, 57% of users on Boats Group platforms are first-timers, thereby expanding the market.
The pre-owned boat market has been also a significant growth driver for Boats Group. As of April 2025, 67% of Boats Group purchases were for used boats. But even with that shift, the company still leads globally in new boat sales, Kolek says.
What’s next: Serving boaters after the sale
Beyond buying and selling, Kolek sees a huge opportunity in serving the day-to-day needs of boaters.
Boat ownership is expensive and time consuming — “every hour on the water is an hour off the water taking care of your boat,” says Kolek, a lifelong boater himself. To take some of the friction out of boat ownership, the CEO sees a need in the company’s next Click & Boat phase for a bigger focus on assisting boaters with ongoing needs such as renting their boats, moving, servicing and maintaining them, and storing them.
With the average boater in the 55+ category, the industry desperately also needs to attract younger boaters and that’s why we’re seeing fractional ownership and boat clubs take off, Kolek says.
“We need to get new boaters into the market. There’s a lot of wealth transfer happening in the world at the moment and so these younger generation buyers are coming online.”
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