Maritime-focused investment bank AMA Capital Partners is partnering Skysail Advisors to pair growing tech companies with capital providers.
The joint venture will help companies assess growth and strategic opportunities, access capital markets and execute mergers and acquisitions.
Funding for maritime tech companies has undergone big changes over the past few years and the partnership will seek to plug some of the gaps.
Chris Weyers, who is heading the joint venture alongside AMA associate Myles McAlpine, said: “We’ve all read about venture capital struggling, right?
“In 2021, you could fund just about anything at an enormous valuation, and it’s done a 180-degree turn — now you can’t really get venture capital money, and a lot of these tech companies that are growing, they’re either modestly profitable or unprofitable, meaning they still need to raise capital to grow their business to get to cash flow breakeven.”
Early inroads
Weyers joined AMA last year, having previously been managing director and head of maritime & energy infrastructure investment banking at Stifel Financial.
“We really feel like we’re kind of an investment banking intermediary that helps the quality tech companies get to a better place strategically and financially, whether that be raising strategic capital, selling themselves or merging and/or partnering with a strategic [investor],” he told TradeWinds.
The joint venture is up and running, operating jointly out of AMA’s office in Stamford, Connecticut and Skysail’s base in Boston. The partners are working together on projects, but an informal relationship has existed for some years.
AMA has already made inroads into the marine technology and service space.
Within the past year, it has received mandates from an AI-enabled software company that focuses on voyage optimisation, as well as from a marine engineering company specialising in solutions for decarbonising shipping and enhancing energy efficiency.
Weyers said tech companies are calling AMA in the hope of finding strategic capital providers for several reasons.
“One, to help these companies supercharge growth, they want to partner with other people in the industry, whether that be partnering with a bigger tech company like Veson or partnering with a shipowner like a Maersk or a CMA CGM or one of the cruise lines,” he said.
“A number of these big shipping companies have venture capital and a growth equity arm, so they’re willing to invest in these companies and help them grow.”
Few people know the maritime tech space as well as Evangelos Efstathiou, Skysail’s managing director, who will help AMA identify the best opportunities.
He founded Skysail in 2016, following stints at tech platforms Veson, Chinsay and Marsoft, to focus on providing consultancy services to shipowners, commodity traders, private equity investors and industry associations.
Efstathiou told TradeWinds that Skysail has seen a “significant” inflow of venture capital and private equity into the maritime technology space as shipping companies invest in digital transformation and decarbonisation. But the quirks of the industry can be challenging for start-ups.
“I think one of the challenges all companies in maritime tech face is: how do you scale the business to reach profitable growth? Maritime is a very fragmented market in terms of where the owners and operators of the vessels are geographically located, and also where the charterers are based,” he told TradeWinds.
“And it is quite challenging to reach what I like to call ‘escape velocity’ as a tech company when the addressable market is so scattered.”
But as fragmented as the industry is, there are a lot of tech vendors offering quite similar products, AMA managing director Peter Shaerf said.
“It’s really identifying those that are the right products, which Evan [Efstathiou] is particularly astute at, and then us being able to tie it to the right capital, be it strategic [investment], be it outside investors, be it a combination of the two,” he told TradeWinds.
Shaerf thinks the changing attitude towards investment in maritime tech is rippling out and catching the eye of capital providers.
“You’ve got the big companies’ strategics looking to do this and they’ve got their own investment arms. Maersk and CMA CGM are particularly developing technical solutions for their own product,” he said.
“We’ve seen tremendous investment from ship managers — V.Ships and Schulte particularly, I think, have been at the forefront of investing in this space. And then you’ve had the entrepreneurial shipowners, the next generation, [like] Marina Hadjipateras and Christian Oldendorff with Amplifier.
“The appetite is increased within the industry and that has come to the attention particularly of the American capital providers.”
