Business automation in Falmouth.
A working port with a ship repair yard, a university campus and a harbour full of technical businesses. Very little of what happens here fits a generic platform.
Autaimate builds business automation and custom software for Falmouth and Penryn businesses, from a studio in St Austell. Commissions start with a £750 scoping session, then run at a fixed price from £8,500, typically live in about four weeks. You own the code.
A working port, not a harbour view
Falmouth has one of the deepest natural harbours in the world and a working ship repair yard to go with it. Marine engineering, chandlery, boatyards, survey and inspection work, and the supply chain that keeps all of it running — these are technical businesses carrying technical record-keeping obligations.
Marine work generates paperwork of a particular kind: condition surveys, job cards, certification, parts traceability. Specific enough that mass-market tools do not cover it, and small enough that the specialist marine software is priced for shipping companies rather than a yard employing twelve people. The gap in the middle is where businesses end up on spreadsheets.
Alongside that sit the university and the Penryn campus, which have given the town a genuine creative and digital sector, and a hospitality trade running closer to year-round than the north coast manages. Three quite different economies inside one small place, and the software market treats all three as one.
For a town that documents everything it does
Marine and survey work lives or dies on the record. These are the four places it usually breaks.
Survey and condition reporting
Voice-first reporting that turns a survey into a finished, structured PDF before you step off the vessel. Works fully offline, which matters in a yard, in a hold, or on the water.
Job cards and parts traceability
What was done, by whom, with which part, on which vessel. Built so the certification trail falls out of the work as a by-product rather than being assembled on a Friday afternoon from memory.
Quoting for jobs that are never the same twice
Marine work rarely repeats. Costing tools built around how you actually price — materials, labour, contingency, the bits you know from experience will overrun — rather than a template designed for fixed-price retail.
Enquiry capture for a yard
An assistant that answers from your own confirmed material and captures every enquiry with a name and a number. For a yard with limited berths, the first to reply usually gets the booking.
What we know, and what we do not
We do not understand marine work the way a surveyor does, and we would not claim to. What we do understand is inspection and certification workflows, because that is exactly what our voice-first product does for BS EN 1176 playground inspection — Cornwall Play Safety Ltd use it across the county to produce standards-referenced reports on site.
The scoping session is where those two things meet. You bring the trade knowledge and we bring the process knowledge, and between them a build gets defined properly. That is a healthier arrangement than a supplier claiming domain expertise they picked up from a brochure.
Autaimate is based in St Austell, so Falmouth is a straightforward drive. For anything involving a yard or a vessel, seeing the actual working conditions changes design decisions in a way a phone call never does.
Falmouth questions
Do you understand marine work? +
Not the way a marine surveyor does, and pretending otherwise would be the fastest way to build the wrong thing. What we understand is inspection and certification workflows — the same shape of problem our playground inspection product solves to BS EN 1176. You bring the trade, we bring how to turn it into software that gets used.
Will it work on the water or in the yard with no signal? +
Yes. Our inspection apps work fully offline and sync when a connection returns. In a steel hull or halfway down a pontoon, anything requiring a live connection is not a tool.
What does it cost for a yard or a marine business? +
Commissions start with a £750 scoping session, then run at a fixed price from £8,500. For a business where a survey currently takes an hour on the vessel and an evening writing up, the arithmetic tends to work out quickly.
Can it produce certification our customers or class societies will accept? +
It can produce the record consistently, with audit logging and dated entries, in whatever format you specify. What it cannot do is decide what that format should be — that comes from you and from whoever you are certifying to. We build to the spec, we do not invent it.
We are a creative studio near the campus, not a boatyard. Do you work with us? +
Yes. The common thread is not the industry, it is having a process specific enough that generic software fits it badly. That describes a good number of the studios and agencies around Penryn.
Do we own the software? +
Yes — the repository is transferred on delivery with documentation and deployment configuration. Any competent developer can pick it up, which matters more in a specialist trade where you may want someone with marine knowledge maintaining it later.
Also covering
Bring the survey, not a specification.
Show us what the paperwork actually looks like at the end of a job. That conversation is worth more than any amount of requirements gathering.