Voyager, the US-based maritime workflow management start-up, says it has raised $1.5m in new seed funding.
The fundraiser was co-led by ATX Venture Partners, Blue Bear Capital, GreenHawk Capital, and Phaze Ventures.
The new funds will be used to expand the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) network’s offerings, further acquire and expand its customer base, and grow its engineering, development, marketing and sales teams.
“Shipping bulk commodities is still a highly manual and complex process, with $360bn in ocean freight managed globally by email, phone, fax and text in a high-volume, fast-paced environment,” said Voyager co-founder and chief executive Matthew Costello.
“Data is decentralized and unstructured, and the process is rife with inefficiencies, lost opportunities, costly human errors and billions in losses.”
Current partners of Voyager’s include Norwegian state-owned oil company Equinor and other unnamed companies on the platform spanning “brokerage, terminal, agency, ship-owning and major producers”.
The company was founded in 2018 by ex-Stolt-Nielsen executives Costello and fellow co-founder Bret Smart, who is chief operating officer.
A study by the two men is said to have shown that showed roughly 40% of employee time in the industry was spent on “low-value and low-complexity tasks”, such as manual data entry, error checking documents and forwarding.
“One shipment alone generates more than 4,000 emails and hundreds of documents with at least 10 companies working together across time zones,” the company said.
“Teams are overloaded and employees’ time is wasted sorting, filing and reviewing emails. Mistakes are frequent and costly, and notably, more than 95% of a company’s data is sitting in folders, spreadsheets, PDFs and inboxes, inaccessible to the company and users at scale.”
Voyager claims that the industry is “taking note” with one unnamed company said to have identified over $4m in annual savings by moving to its platform.
“Opportunities for innovation in maritime abound, as the need for technological advancements exist in one of the world’s biggest industries,” said Chris Shonk, managing partner at ATX Venture Partners.
“The Voyager cloud platform stands to bring global transactions and communications into the modern era – poised to save the bulk shipping industry billions.”
