About
We started in a harbour office.
Tidewell Labs is a small, remote-first team building planning software for the ports that big-terminal software forgot.
Our story
A tide table, a whiteboard and a phone that never stopped.
Isolde Brannagh spent nine years planning berths for a small port. Every plan started on a whiteboard, was checked against a paper tide table, and was rebuilt from scratch whenever a ship ran late, which was most days.
The tools on the market were built for container terminals with planning departments. Small ports and short-sea operators got spreadsheets. So in 2024 she left the harbour office to build the planner she had always wanted: one that understands tide windows, respects the harbour master’s rules and can be read at a glance on the quay.
Today Tidewell Labs is a seed-stage company working with ports and operators around the coast. We are remote-first and deliberately small, and we would rather do three ports properly than thirty badly.
Tidewell Labs starts with a spreadsheet, a paper tide table and a lot of phone calls to harbour masters.
Osric Vane joins as CTO. The first solver plans a real week of calls at Port of Carrow Sound.
Seed round from a small group of angels who spent their careers in shipping. Juno, Bram and Sefa join the crew.
Tidewell Route enters pilot with Hessel Short-Sea Lines; Brackwater Ferry Terminal goes live on Tidewell Berth.
Mira Castellane joins as our first developer advocate.
The crew
Who builds Tidewell Labs
Planners, engineers and one designer, spread across several time zones and two coastlines.
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Isolde Brannagh
Founder & CEO
Spent nine years planning berths in a harbour master’s office with a whiteboard and a tide table. Still keeps the tide table on her desk, for luck.
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Osric Vane
Chief Technology Officer
Wrote the first Tidewell Berth solver in 2024 and led engineering through our first three customers. Osric moved on from Tidewell Labs this month.
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Juno Aldercott
Senior Engineer, Solver
Constraint programming, interval scheduling and very long test fixtures. Owns the planner that decides who goes alongside when.
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Bram Oosterhuis-Lind
Head of Operations
Former container terminal planner. Runs onboarding for every new port and picks up the phone when a plan looks wrong.
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Sefa Tannahill
Product Designer
Designs screens that still work on a quayside tablet, in the rain, with gloves on.
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Mira Castellane
Developer Advocate
Joined in September 2026. Writes the docs, the example integrations and the talks, and wants to hear what you are building.
How we work
Three rules we try not to break.
A plan a harbour master can read
If the person on the quay cannot explain the plan, the plan is wrong, however clever the solver was.
Boring on purpose
Ports run for decades. We choose dull, well-understood technology and write down why.
Your data is yours
No resale, no tracking, full exports on request. When you leave, your history leaves with you.
Want to pilot Tidewell Berth at your port? Write to hello@tidewell-lab.xyz.