GSCW chat recap: Big year ahead for maritime tech startups

BIO: Efstathiou is the CEO of Burmester & Vogel, a Boston-based demurrage calculation and freight intelligence platform for commodity traders, industrial producers, shipowners, shipbrokers and port agents. He is also the CEO of SkySail Advisors, a logistics M&A advisory and strategy consulting firm he founded in 2016. SkySail combines knowledge and know-how of data science and software technologies with deep industry relationships with shippers, carriers and financial institutions.

KEY QUOTES FROM EFSTATHIOU:

“We saw some big funding movements on the freight forwarding side and trucking freight tech side. Those segments raised hundreds of millions of dollars. And that’s when the VCs and private equity said, ‘Well, what other areas of transportation have yet to digitalize?’ [And they saw] the number of tech players in maritime and that the scale of these players was generally on the small side … and that a tech company that came out with good innovation could really capture a lot of the market.”

“We’ve been pretty surprised by what we’ve seen — surprised in a good way — with some of the [maritime tech] valuations. The valuations we’ve seen for recent investments suggest that investors are really looking beyond what the company is currently making to what the addressable market is and what the possibilities are for capturing that market.”

“There has been a huge amount of activity — among the existing tech companies as well as the startups we see popping up almost every week — focusing on helping you calculate your emissions, reducing those emissions, measuring your voyage performance and helping you reduce your overall cost and your [carbon] footprint.”