From the outside looking in, Tundra Angels just invested in a boat company.

But if Flamingo Marine was just a boat company, it wouldn’t have been enough to invest.

It wouldn’t. We don’t look to invest in the next hot product in an industry. 

Tundra Angels looks to invest in movements that represent paradigm shifts in an industry. 

Without a paradigm shift, a startup just doesn’t have enough magnetic attraction to turn heads to tilt the demand in its favor. 

Flamingo represents a paradigm shift in marine boating. It’s a paradigm shift across the boating experience, across the business model, across the manufacturing process, and across the supply chain.

Flamingo Marine quite literally re-invents how boats are built.

I found out about Flamingo Marine through one of our Tundra Angels’ investors, who operates several companies in the marine space and has been in the marine industry for most of his career. 

The Flamingo team had independently reached out to this CEO, who was also part of Tundra Angels, because he was an angel investor strategic to the marine space. This investor let me know about the opportunity, and sent the pitch deck over to me in the below email:

Several days after the chat, I connected with this investor via phone after they had a chance to speak with the team.

Since this investor runs several companies in the marine space, I expected that this investor would identify several fatal flaws and tell me that it doesn’t make sense for me to pursue it. 

But instead, this investor was highly intrigued. He went through the premises of all the things they were doing and said that it seems like it may hold weight. 

That was an initial pulse check for me - I should not not just discount it, but if an expert in the industry is telling me that it may hold weight, I should actually pay close attention. 

Over the course of months, we had conversations with the Flamingo Marine team. I grew to really enjoy talking with them. I liked Brian Davis’ salesmanship and vision casting. I appreciated Eric Davis’ expertise from a design perspective. I enjoyed Trent Warnke’s unique angle that he brought to the table from helping build Rivian. 

When we moved forward with taking commitments on Flamingo, this Tundra Angels investor, who initially made the introduction to the company, did a write-up of why this person was excited about Flamingo and why they would be investing. That’s the power of a network of CEOs who are experts in their industries. 

Product Video

Part of what I do is amplify the stories of our founders. In the case of Flamingo, the story is deeply personal, and I wanted to make sure you heard more of the details of the product in their own voice. So, I’m happy to share their product launch video below.

Primary Reasons Why Tundra Angels Invested in Flamingo Marine

1) The Team: The Flamingo Team Sold their Previous Venture to Volvo Group

One might figure that you don’t start a startup in the marine space without prior experience. One of the main factors that gave our investors confidence to invest was that this team had done it before. 

Prior to founding Flamingo Marine, Brian Davis, Eric Davis, and the team founded Seven Marine. If you are not familiar with the companies or products in the marine market, the name Seven Marine might not mean much. But from conversations with this strategic angel investor, who has been in this space for most of his career, we learned that Seven Marine is a legendary story. 

Seven Marine was a propulsion company that Brian Davis, Eric Davis, and Rick Davis founded in 2010. Over time, the company gained significant attention in the marine propulsion industry for pushing the boundaries of outboard engine technology. 

In 2011, Seven Marine introduced the 557 hp outboard, which was the most powerful outboard engine in the world at the time. This was followed by the 627 hp engine, which is still the most powerful outboard ever made. This actually was a supercharged General Motors 6.2L V8 engine. In short, the team illuminated how automotive performance engineering could be successfully adapted to marine applications.

Even though SevenMarine was a small company, they held a disproportionate amount of influence on the marine propulsion industry, and pushed established players like Mercury, Yamaha, and Suzuki to develop larger and more powerful outboards.

The team eventually sold Seven Marine to Volvo Penta in 2017.

Thus, Flamingo Marine is the beneficiary of the aggregation of all of the founding team’s experience, know-how, market connections, etc. 

One neat part is that many of the employees and VPs that were around for Seven Marine were also a part of Flamingo. Very rarely does an investor get the opportunity to invest in a 20+ person team, largely of which has already done it together once.

I will tell you that because of the nuances of the marine industry and the relationships needed, if the team were first time founders in this space, there would have been far less enthusiasm on the investment side. 

2) Non-Obvious Insight: The Rigidity of the Boating Market

In talking with the Flamingo team about the current boating experience for consumers, one of the things that we continued to come back to was the staleness of the boat design, the layout, the overall package. Brian and team used the word “A sea of sameness.” 

Yet, part of understanding a venture investment deal is getting clarity on what fundamentally unlocks the opportunity. To that end, one of the things that we think about is the question, “Who really is the villain here in this opportunity?” 

In due diligence, we found that identifying the villain was illuminated in understanding the question, “Why is it all a sea of sameness? Why do all of the pontoon boats look and feel the same?”

Here is the Flamingo team’s fundamental insight - 

The pontoon boat market looks and sounds the same because all of the boat OEMs source all of the same boat parts from the same suppliers. Then, what the boat OEMs do best is put those parts together. 

The rigidity of the industry is the villain. That is the fundamental solve that results in the outcome of the consumer experience. 

With that clarity in view, we saw the Flamingo opportunity in a different light. Importantly, one cannot build a boating experience that contrasts the market without solving for the rigidity. 

Thus, the fundamental solve is actually not in building a different boat. The solve is in moving away from the rigidity of the manufacturing process. 

I will expound on how Flamingo does this in the next point. 

3) The Platform: Flamingo is Not Just a Boat Company

To say that Flamingo is a boat startup is a gross mischaracterization. 

Don’t get me wrong - that’s how it started. It’s also way more. 

There are markets where, in order to create a contrasting product to the market, you actually have to go the distance not only to create that product, but also create a different business model than the industry. In the case of a manufactured product, you also have to create a different supply chain. 

That’s what Flamingo has done. 

To borrow the Steve Jobs quote, you need to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology and process. 

In the case of Flamingo, it’s not only building a contrasting boat than the rest of the market. It is. But on the way to do that, it’s actually re-creating the business model of how boats are sold and re-creating the supply chain of how boats are built. 

That’s why, in order to build a boating experience that contrasts the market, they discovered that they need to be vertically integrated. 

4) A Shift to Boat Personalization: Not “This OR That” but this “AND” that. 

In many markets, the consumer shift has been in play for a long time has been to move toward more personalization. Across consumer products, across B2B products, etc. the trend has been moving from a “one size fits all or most” to a “you can have the size that fits you.” 

In boating, the question around personalization had always been around superficial questions - what style of trim would you like, what color paint would you like, etc. 

But none of those affected the way the consumers enjoyed and engaged with the boating experience. 

With Flamingo, one of their key value drivers is best explained in that they had a slide on their pitch deck where there were certain types of boats - full-size bow lounge, swing back, fishing, ultra entertainer, quad lounge, etc. 

On that slide, Brian said, “You have to decide how you will use the boat on the day you buy it.” 

He said, “The market right now is that you can have this OR that. The Flamingo value equation is that you can have this AND that.”

I’m skirting some of these details intentionally. Some of these details are teased in the product video above. But make no mistake - as more press hits the wire as the boats hit the water in 2026, you’ll understand what it means to have this AND that.

Closing Thoughts

One of my VC heroes is Mike Maples Jr from Floodgate.VC. He says something profound which applies here - startups are not a company. Startups are a movement. In the beginning, the earlier believers in the movement sort of feel like they are being let in on a secret. As the movement grows, over time, if successful the secret eventually becomes mass-market consensus.

Through the process of doing due diligence on Flamingo, I will say that it absolutely felt that we were being let in on a secret. A secret about the future of the boating market of how boats will be manufactured, what the supply chain could be like, etc. that a scant number of people were aware of at this moment in time.

Why Tundra Angels chose to invest was because we had this deep conviction that this secret is the future of this industry. Because in building a boating experience that contrasts the market, you first need to go the distance and solve for the entire platform - the business model, the supply chain, and the manufacturing process.

I can’t wait for the Flamingo secret to become mass market consensus.

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