MarineTraffic employees like doing puzzles during quick breaks from work.

The freshly completed piecework image of an oceangoing vessel lay on a desk outside the office of Demitris Memos, MarineTraffic CEO on one recent day last month.

“Puzzles keep one’s mind sharp,” he explains. They are also a metaphor for how MarineTraffic has been slowly and patiently piecing its market together — from its beginnings eleven years ago as a computer geek’s experimental website, to becoming today the world’s largest operator of automatic identification system (AIS) vessel monitoring networks.