Just as Greek shipping tech start-up Harbor Lab opened its doors for business in March last year, much of the country went into a nationwide coronavirus lockdown.
It proved to a blessing in disguise.
“Due to the virus, many shipping companies couldn’t carry out their port disbursements manually, so they came to us to show them our software,” said the company's founder and chief executive Antonis Malaxianakis.
From a single initial client — Petros Pappas' tanker company Product Shipping & Trading (PST) — about 260 vessels managed by firms such as Diana Shipping Services and Pleiades Shipping Agents have come to Harbor Lab’s digital tool for port expenses management.
One of them, the Ioannis Martinos-led Signal Group, has even become a shareholder.
From a team of three people in spring last year, the company expanded to 26 and moved to Athens offices a few weeks ago.
Believing in numbers
The team includes 10 port analysts, who are in regular contact with harbours and agents around the world to update, process and feed the latest information on port service charges into the company's system.
Based on the data, another team of disbursements analysts cross-check bills for port services to spot irregularities or overcharges.
“We don’t believe in manual labour, we believe in algorithms,” says Malaxianakis, who studied statistics at the university of Piraeus.
Using Harbor Lab software, a manager can handle four times the number of port expenses than they could manually with an Excel table, according to Malaxianakis.
Clients have begun outsourcing their entire disbursement accounts and related know-your-customer activities to the company.
Harbor Lab is now starting to look beyond its traditional Greek base and recently hired sales representatives to push its business abroad. Last month, the company became the first Greek member of the Blue Alliance Partners, a London-based sales accelerator for maritime companies.
“We’re looking for ways to enter the international market,” said Harbor Lab co-owner Grigoris Lamprou, who is also a shareholder in ProcureShip — another Greek shipping tech start-up.
From pergolas to port disbursements
Just as in the case of ProcureShip and other companies in the country’s fledgling shipping software scene, large Greek shipping firms played a key role in nurturing Harbor Lab.
Malaxianakis had no shipping background. He was working at his family’s outdoor space design company when he met Eleni Martinou in 2013 to help her decorate her office.
Grabbing the opportunity, he slipped a CV into her hands.
“The Greek crisis was at its peak at the time, wreaking havoc with onshore companies,” Malaxianakis remembers. “I wanted to do something that wasn’t dependent on the Greek economy and shipping immediately came to mind”.
The impromptu job application led to an internship and then a steady job on disbursement accounts at Thenamaris.
In 2018, Malaxianakis switched to PST, where he had the idea he would later turn into his own business.
“I started on my own, sketching dashboards by hand after office hours”.
When Malaxianakis decided to set up Harbor Lab, his Thenamaris boss, Martinos, became a shareholder and PST became his first client.
