Trade-focused communications platform Sedna is getting bigger and has acquired its former rival, maritime email firm Nordic IT.
No price was disclosed for the transaction, which will boost Sedna’s customer book to more than 500 companies.
Sedna’s founder and chief executive Bill Dobie said:“Shipping is a talking business, a conversation business, and trying to improve that means that we can make a direct impact on day-to-day users.
“The heart of it is that we think the conversation is central to maritime, and so we’re buying Nordic IT so can accelerate our laser focus on trying to make the user’s life easier by making sure they don’t miss an important email.”
Nordic IT’s reMARK, reMARK Cloud, and MARK5 platforms operate using data pulled from shipping companies’ own emails to support commercial decision-making such as chartering and vessel operations.
Going forward, these platforms will be combined with Sedna’s own artificial intelligence capabilities to build out a more powerful platform.
The acquisition will strengthen Sedna’s presence in Copenhagen and Singapore with two new leaders.
Jacob Koch Blicher will head up operations in Europe and the Middle East, while Travis Monson will lead in the Asia Pacific region.
Martin Hvass Morup, who has led Nordic IT since 2021, will continue as Blicher’s strategic advisor.
Sedna was founded by shipping veteran Dobie in 2017 and is backed by venture capital firms Insight Partners, GK Goh Ventures, Stride.VC, Chalfen Ventures and SAP.
“I have had thousands of conversations over almost 15 years, trying to tell people that you don’t need to digitise your work. It’s already digital. It’s in your email,” Dobie told TradeWinds.
“You just have to find a way to work with that and make that work better.”
Dobie said that when Sedna began to win clients from Nordic IT, the competition was friendly and he was impressed with what he saw from his rivals.
“We saw the way they kept the customer first. They weren’t hostile to working with us. They solved the problem the customer needed solving, which was shifting their email over to us,” he explained.
“That left a very good first impression from my experience.
“Then I ran into Martin, the CEO, at a conference, and we chatted a bit and the relationship kind of just went on from there.”
Earlier this year, Sedna began thinking seriously about how to bring more people with expertise into its platform earlier, but it had to be customer-minded people with empathy for maritime and its challenges and a firm understanding of the technical side of email, Dobie said.
“Nordic is a natural fit because they’ve been at this a really long time,” he said.
Putting the transaction together and completing it took “three or four months”.
“I think that if we can continue to show the market that the conversation can be made smarter and less intensive, through a reimagined way of doing email, I think we can help other start-ups and our customers insert new workflows into that,” Dobie said of the future.
“Sedna is an interface to your communications that happens to come from email, it’s just the main source now, but we already have a lot of examples — some with the oil majors, some with other customers — where they can put actions or interactions inside of Sedna itself that help them complete a workflow.”
Dobie said Sedna would be open to buying other firms if they help his company meet its three objectives.
“One is creating a language, a programming language, inside of Sedna that’s really easy to build on to,” he explained.
“Two is making sure that the data inside of Sedna can be expressed and understood through AI only for the customers, exclusively for their private use, and that they can use it to pull data points out.
“And then third, so that their own developers or partner start-ups can actually build some interactions with that data.”
Sedna wants to grow by creating a “bigger surface area of people” inside its communications platform, Dobie added.
“The decisions that we’re going to be guided by is keeping [the customer] happy and being able to fix faster and effectively, and to reduce risk, and then the product decisions and the strategy can come after that,” Dobie said.
“I think way too much strategy right now sits in front of that, and we kind of try to come at it from the user’s point of view.”
