Tansu's Moonshot Sells at EUR 8.95m After a 2026 Refit

Who sold Moonshot and for how much?

Max Bulley of Y.CO represented the seller and Alain Auvare of Fraser Monaco introduced the buyer on the sale of the 39.1-metre motor yacht Moonshot, which closed against a last asking price of EUR 8.95 million.

BOAT International confirmed the sale on 24 August 2026, naming both brokers on the record for the same transaction, a cross-house structure common at this size where the selling agency and the buyer's introducing agency are two separate, established firms rather than one broker on both sides. Fraser, whose Monaco office handled the buy side, was founded in 1947 and describes itself as the world's largest full-service yacht brokerage, with more than 240 staff across 21 offices and a listed portfolio worth over USD 6 billion. Y.CO, on the sell side, is younger and smaller: co-founders Charlie Birkett and Gary Wright opened its first Monaco office in 2004 with ten staff, building a yacht management business first and adding brokerage later, and the firm now employs around 120 people worldwide.

Moonshot herself is RINA-classed, built in 2017, and constructed in epoxy and wood rather than the glass-reinforced plastic or aluminium more common on yachts this length. Classification by RINA, the Italian society used across much of the mid-size custom yacht market, matters more on an unconventional hull material than it would on a standard GRP build: it gives a buyer, an insurer and a lender the third-party structural sign-off that an unclassed custom hull cannot offer, which is one reason a boutique wood-epoxy yacht can still trade through mainstream brokerage channels. At 295 gross tons on a 39.1-metre hull, she carries genuinely generous interior volume for her length, and she sleeps 8 guests across 4 cabins with a crew of 5. Y.CO also lists Moonshot directly on its own site, which corroborates the specification and the broker attribution independently of the BOAT International report.

Who built Moonshot and who designed her?

Moonshot is a Tigershark-model motor yacht from the Istanbul-based builder Tansu Yachts, exterior-styled by the yard's own founder Riza Tansu, with naval architecture by the Dutch firm Diana Yacht Design and interiors from UraStudio working alongside Tansu's in-house team.

Tansu Yachts was founded in Istanbul in 1996 by Riza Tansu and presented its first boat, the 23.6-metre custom Troy Explorer, in 1998. Between 1996 and 2018 the yard launched 24 superyachts, and it built its reputation on a deliberately narrow style: bold, military-inspired exteriors paired with minimalist interiors, aimed at owners who want something less ostentatious than the trends dominating the mainstream Italian and Dutch yards. Moonshot's epoxy-and-wood construction is part of that same identity, a method the yard has used across multiple Tigershark hulls rather than as a one-off experiment. Diana Yacht Design, the Amstelveen-based naval architecture and engineering house behind Moonshot's underlying hull, is a genuinely established name in its own right: founded in 1971, it has contributed to more than 95 delivered superyachts over five decades, ranging from explorer yachts to custom builds exceeding 100 metres, and two of its recent projects were nominated at the 2025 World Superyacht Awards.

UraStudio, the Istanbul firm credited with the interiors alongside Tansu's own team, describes itself as a multidisciplinary architecture and design practice rather than a yacht-only specialist, working across residential, commercial and hospitality projects as well as yachts. That three-way design credit, exterior by the yard's own founder, naval architecture from an outside specialist with a five-decade track record, interior from a second outside studio, is a common structure for a boutique custom yard: it keeps the hull and styling under one signature while bringing outside engineering and interior expertise to a build the yard could not fully staff on its own.

What was refitted on Moonshot and why does that matter to a buyer?

Moonshot's recent full interior refit and systems overhaul, cited directly by her selling broker, is very likely a reason a 2017 hull sold close to its asking price in a market that increasingly discounts yachts without a documented recent refit.

BOAT International quotes her selling broker saying Moonshot "delivers far more than her size suggests," pointing to a spacious aft deck and swim platform alongside the recent full interior refit and systems updates. Those upgrades are the kind of maintenance record that a serious buyer's surveyor checks first on a nine-year-old hull, and having them completed and documented before the yacht went to market removes exactly the negotiating leverage an unrefitted equivalent would hand a buyer during survey.

No independent survey report or third-party sea trial is publicly available for this sale; the refit and performance details above come from the broker's own marketing materials as reported by BOAT International, not from an independent inspection. That is normal for a private brokerage transaction, where survey findings are rarely made public, but it is worth an owner in this bracket noting: closing near asking on broker-stated condition is still the more useful signal here than any single technical figure, because it shows a buyer was satisfied enough with what he saw to move without a public price cut.

What does the Moonshot sale signal for the 35-40 metre bracket?

The Moonshot sale is a small but genuine signal that a well-maintained, recently refitted 35-40 metre motor yacht can still close near its asking price even from a boutique, non-mainstream builder outside the large Italian and Dutch production yards.

Her performance figures are modest for the size: a 15.8-knot top speed and 13-knot cruise, on twin Caterpillar diesels with a 3,000 nautical mile range, are slower than many contemporary 39-metre GRP motoryachts from the mainstream yards. Four cabins for 8 guests on a 39-metre hull is also a more modest capacity than some same-length competitors offer, a trade-off for the extra beam and volume the epoxy-and-wood construction affords elsewhere in the layout. Tansu delivered only 24 superyachts in its first 22 years, which makes any single Tigershark hull a comparatively rare resale next to a production model from a larger yard, where dozens of sister ships can compete for the same buyer's attention and depress an individual seller's leverage.

For an owner selling in this bracket, the transferable lesson is not about Tansu specifically. A boutique, Turkish-built, wood-epoxy yacht sits in a narrower resale niche than a GRP or aluminium hull from a mainstream European yard, and it sold near asking anyway because the condition story was current and documented. Price against real comparables in your own construction and size niche, finish the refit before you list rather than during negotiation, and let two established brokerage houses, one on each side, do the work of finding a buyer who already understands what he is looking at.