Blue Water Index Goes Live at 2026 Cannes Yachting Festival

He Retired to Sail the World. Then He Tried to Figure Out What a Boat Was Worth.

Blue Water Index makes its international debut at Cannes with a new approach to marine valuation and market intelligence.

CANNES, France & OTTAWA, Canada — September 8, 2026 — Robb Corrigan had a simple retirement plan: buy a sailboat and spend the next chapter of his life sailing the oceans of the world.

Then he found the boat.

And asked what should have been a simple question:

What is she actually worth?

After 30 years in enterprise software, including 17 years at IBM, Corrigan was accustomed to industries where data helped people make big decisions. But in recreational boating, he found opinions, price guides and thousands of comparable listings — without a single independent source that brought the market evidence together and explained the answer.

So instead of buying the boat, he started building Blue Water Index (BWI).

Today, at the Cannes Yachting Festival, the Canadian company is introducing its marine valuation and market-intelligence platform to the international yachting industry.

“I wasn’t looking to start a company. I was looking for a boat,” said Corrigan, founder and CEO of Blue Water Index. “But the more I tried to understand what I should actually pay, the more obvious the gap became. There was an enormous amount of market data out there, but no independent way to bring it together into an answer I could understand and trust. After spending my career working with data, it was a problem that was very hard to ignore.”>

Blue Water Index continuously monitors the leisure boat market, following asking prices, price changes, time on market and other market signals. It standardizes fragmented vessel information across different sources, languages, currencies and naming conventions, then applies statistical pricing models to produce an estimated market value, confidence range, comparable vessels and the evidence behind the estimate.

As at August 31, 2026, BWI was monitoring 158 data sources and tracking 57,952 actively priced vessels representing $22.31B (€19.44B) in tracked asking value

The ambition extends well beyond helping someone decide what to pay for a boat.

Blue Water Index is building a common valuation and market-intelligence layer for the marine industry, with applications for yacht brokers and dealers, marine surveyors, insurers, lenders and other professionals who need credible market evidence to support pricing, appraisal, underwriting, collateral and portfolio decisions.

BWI isn’t designed to replace professional judgement. It is designed to give professionals better evidence on which to exercise it.

“Great brokers know their markets and great surveyors know boats,” Corrigan said. “We’re not trying to replace either. We want to give them an independent view of the market that hasn’t existed before — and show them the evidence behind it.”>

Cannes provides an appropriate stage for BWI’s international debut. The 2026 Cannes Yachting Festival brings together more than 680 exhibitors and 710 boats and yachts, along with brokers, builders, owners and marine professionals from around the world.

And for anyone convinced they already know what boats are worth, BWI is putting that confidence to the test. “The Valuation Challenge” is a 60-second contest asking Cannes attendees to guess the asking prices of three boats currently on the market. Scores will be ranked on a live leaderboard throughout the festival, with the top performer crowned the 2026 Valuation Challenge champion.

Blue Water Index has also opened a $2 million seed financing round to accelerate development, expand market coverage and build out its professional and enterprise capabilities.

Corrigan still intends to buy that sailboat and sail the world.

He just has a company to build first.

About Blue Water Index Blue Water Index Inc. is a marine valuation and market-intelligence company building an independent, transparent reference for recreational boat values. BWI combines continuous market monitoring, standardized vessel data and statistical pricing models to turn fragmented market evidence into explainable valuations and actionable intelligence. Professionals can also subscribe to BWI’s new monthly Market Pulse – a free publication that follows pricing behaviour across the recreational boat market. The company is based in Ottawa, Canada.

Every boat that changes hands deserves an honest number.

Media, partnership and investor inquiries Blue Water Index | partners@bluewaterindex.com | robb@bluewaterindex.com | +1 613 276 0455