VesselMan founder Stig Linna and chief executive Glenn Edvardsen together cover both sides of the business through their knowledge of the shipping and IT industries.
Whenever 33-year digital veteran Linna lacks the shipping knowledge, then master mariner Edvardsen covers the gap with more than 20 years of maritime experience — and vice versa.
This story of their synergy has also been playing well in the market, as Edvardsen says the two have been sounding out potential investors in initial efforts to ramp up the dry-docking software specialist.
Linna, 57, has already founded and sold one IT company, E-vita, which had about 65 staff when it was snapped up by Stockholm’s Acando. While Linna holds a master’s degree in business management, he first started studying artificial intelligence more than 30 years ago.
VesselMan, the company, was founded in 2015 but its cloud-based software began to take shape about eight years ago and was used on the yard-side first.
Using his experience from E-vita on many customer-specific implementations of process, portals and collaboration tools, Linna says he “went into the cloud-based Amazon platform and made a true SaaS [software as a service] level-four application”.
“I think it was 2013 when I was looking at the globe, just wondering what to do, and I just realised that shipping should be a place where you could do some improvements, especially in Norway," he says. "But I ended up working for a shipyard in Bahrain for one or two years, so it all started with the shiprepair side.”
While working at the yard, it dawned on Linna that the software he developed for that project would be a boon for any shipowners hoping to take better control of their dry-dockings, so he began an effort to launch what would become VesselMan.
Perfect fit
Edvardsen entered the picture after he was directly contacted by state-owned development organisation Innovation Norway, which has been providing support to Linna’s company. Linna says it was also looking to provide him with access and much-needed insight into the maritime industry, and saw Edvardsen as a perfect fit.
Among other maritime roles, Edvardsen worked as a chief officer on Wallenius Wilhelmsen vessels, a chartering manager at Grieg Logistics, vice-president of marine sales at ABB and head of shipping at StormGeo before he joined VesselMan.
Edvardsen says his background has been important in being able to take new software into a conservative industry, which tends to resist developers who have little knowledge of shipping.
