Built by someone who grew up on the water.

Alvaro has been around boats his whole life. Not as a tourist — as someone who owned them, maintained them, and built friendships through them. When those friendships led him into the charter world, he brought something most software founders don't: he actually understood the business from the water up.

He also brought 10 years of experience building scalable software. Not charter-adjacent software — real, production-grade systems designed to handle growth without falling apart. The charter world, he realized, deserved the same quality of tooling that every other industry takes for granted.

What he found instead was a market dominated by booking marketplaces charging operators 20, 30, sometimes more than 50% of their revenue in fees. One friend — a one-boat fishing captain in Miami — was generating bookings but couldn't grow because the platform was taking more than he was keeping. Another ran a small charter company with real overhead: employees, a marina slip, insurance. He'd stopped using the marketplaces entirely because customers found cheaper competitors there — ones who didn't carry his costs. The platform rewarded undercutting, not quality.

Both problems had the same cause: software designed to extract value from operators, not support them.

In 2024, Alvaro started building Charterfy in Miami. The idea was straightforward — give independent charter operators the same tools the big platforms use, at a price that makes sense for a 1- to 10-boat business. Flat monthly fee. No commissions. No per-booking charges. Predictable costs so operators can actually plan and grow.