The question that changed SmartSurf:
why did the rider stop?
SmartSurf started from a real problem on the water: lost boards, drifting riders, broken equipment, offshore stops, and the dangerous minutes when nobody knows exactly what happened.
Viktor Kryvotsiuk
Founder of SmartSurf and Senlay. Kitesurfing and water-sports instructor with 20+ years reading wind, waves, boards, drift, launch risk, and coastal conditions.
GPS tells us where the rider is. Senlay's verification layer helps AI understand what is actually happening around them.Viktor Kryvotsiuk, founder
I saw this many times as an instructor. Boards drift away. Riders lose boards. Wind drops far from shore. Windsurfers break masts. Wingfoilers lose wings. Hydrofoils hit something underwater or get damaged. Sometimes a rider is still visible far from shore, drifting, while sunset is coming and night is close.
First I was solving the problem of finding lost boards and drifting riders. So I built SmartSurf: a solar-powered, epoxy-sealed GPS tracker for the rider and their board, with no buttons, no water-leak path, and magnetic switch control.
Today it sends GPS data with basic safety triggers. The bigger goal was to connect an AI model to that live location data, so reasoning is based on the actual situation instead of only trained data.
Example: a rider stops. Why? The trigger wakes up the model. It checks the situation, track history, map, behavior pattern, duration, drift speed, direction, and distance from shore. That is already useful, but still not enough to answer why the rider stopped.
Here I hit the wall. The LLM had no weather or physical-world context. It did not know wind, current, waves, temperature, atmospheric pressure, tides, fresh satellite imagery, or bottom structure. Without that context, it started guessing.
So I built Senlay — a verification engine that lets SmartSurf compare live sensors, forecast models, marine data, GPS movement, and local spot logic before the AI makes a safety recommendation.
Now, when the model reasons about a rider's situation, it connects to Senlay's verification layer and checks weather data, map data, bathymetry, tides, currents, wind, waves, distance from shore, track history, rider movement, board movement, and the surrounding environment.
The model does not just track a GPS point. It calculates the whole situation: the rider, the board, the weather, the water, the coastline, the bathymetry, the drift direction, and how those things interact in real time. The goal is simple: help before people on shore even realize the situation is becoming dangerous.
