Marina operators run on radios, spreadsheets, and staff who remember which berth is free because they walked past it an hour ago. That system works until a port grows past a certain size, and then every additional boat, service request, and seasonal booking adds a person to the payroll just to keep track of what is happening on the water.
Understanding Sammy PC’s digital twin
Ioannis Kostopoulos saw that problem from inside it. In 2016, he and co-founder Linos Kostopoulos launched Sammy PC in Greece as a booking platform for marinas. Sammy PC is now a port management platform built for marina operators and tourist ports, and its core product is digital twin technology, a virtual model of the physical port that mirrors what is actually happening in real time. Dock staff can see every berth, every service call, and every boat movement on one screen instead of piecing it together from radio calls and paper logs. The measurable effect for operators is fewer staff needed to manage more boats, more services, and more boaters, which is the number that gets a marina director’s attention faster than any feature list.
The shift from booking tool to digital twin was crucial. A booking system tells an operator who reserved a slip next week. A digital twin tells a dockhand, in the moment, which berths are occupied, which boats need fuel or maintenance, and where staff should be walking right now. That difference matters most during peak season, when a single marina can be juggling hundreds of boats, dozens of service requests, and a staff roster that has not grown to match. Sammy PC’s platform is built to close that gap without adding headcount, which is the constraint most marina operators are actually working under.
Testing Sammy PC in Toronto
By 2026, Sammy PC is running that infrastructure across marinas in Greece and other parts of Europe. Ioannis and Linos had a working product, a customer base, and a question they could not answer from Athens: would a system built for European marinas hold up in a North American market with different port operators, different regulatory expectations, and no existing relationships to build on.
That question is what brought them to Toronto for Sprint Week, TBDC’s five-day market entry program. The premise of the week is direct. Instead of months of cold outreach, founders get a compressed sequence of meetings with the buyers, partners, and investors who actually make decisions in their sector, and they find out fast whether the product travels.
What Sprint Week actually proved
For Sammy PC, the answer came from the pattern in the meetings themselves. Nearly every session across the five days ended with a follow-up booked. That is a signal from the other side of the table, and it is the one international founders in tourism and infrastructure technology tend to trust more than a warm introduction, because it means the operator on the other end saw a problem they recognized and a system built to solve it.
What Sprint Week gave Ioannis and Linos was not a finished deal. It was the fastest possible test of a hypothesis: that the operational problem Sammy PC solved in Greek marinas exists in North American ports too, and that the people who run those ports would recognize the solution when they saw it. Based on how many of them asked for a second conversation, the hypothesis held.
Sammy PC’s episode of Northbound, TBDC’s documentary series following international founders through Sprint Week, is available now, with Ioannis walking through the build, the Toronto week, and what comes next for the company in North America.
Learn more about TBDC’s Horizon program for European founders entering North America.
