About

Maritime transport is responsible for 2,9% of global greenhouse gases with a projection to double in less than 30 years, while IMO targets to reduce emissions by 70% by 2050 compared to 2008. Hence, there is a lot of interest gathered around solutions aiming to reduce the carbon footprint of cargo vessels. Among those, weather routing solutions today, have managed to save only 3 to 10% in fuel consumption, per voyage. The problem is that marine weather forecasts, which are the catalyst of routing performance, have reached an accuracy and resolution dead-end due to the chaotic character of the modeled physical processes. AlongRoute comes to change all that. With groundbreaking AI-based models, we have managed to overcome the physics barriers and for the first time, we are able to produce marine weather forecasts of unparalleled accuracy and resolution. With our data, weather routing solutions can perform up to 130% better than today, with a huge impact towards a greener, safer, and more cost-efficient maritime.

Solution & Product

AlongRoute's data-driven AI models learn how physics work by "imitating" vast amounts of measurement and reanalysis data and do not depend on physical modeling. Thus, we are reaching unbeaten accuracy levels in comparison to our competitors who mostly offer third-party data (e.g. ECMWF) from traditional models. We offer highly-accurate input to our customer's systems, along with their preselected vessel routes of service. Our plug-and-play APIs are designed to work efficiently with any system, without any extra fuss. Moreover, our solutions are developed in-house and thus are fully customizable to serve any customer need. At the moment we are offering high-resolution, one-hourly forecasts of the wave, wind, and current parameters for the Mediterranean Sea on a 4x4km grid. Currently, we have developed and validated our MVP for the Mediterranean Sea and starting to get traction with potential users. Our strategy and pipeline are mature and ready to scale up to the global oceans in a swift and efficient manner.

Innovation & Scalability

Our smart developed, trained and operated AI models which can perform equally, and in some cases better than existing numerical models. However, our models are projected to become better and better, whereas numerical forecast models have long reached their performance dead-end. Also, in contrast to numerical models, our set-up is extremely efficient in terms of computational resources and thus can easily produce forecasts in fine spatial and temporal resolutions on a global scale.

Traction & achievements

The team has been supported and funded by the DigiCirc Blue Economy Accelerator to develop the first PoC, Business Plan, Market Research, and MVP. Moreover, during the 3rd and last Phase of this Accelerator the company was selected to be further supported and funded with 100k € to validate the MVP in an operational environment with very promising results. In parallel, the team is moving forward in networking and engaging early adopters. In this respect, there is active correspondence and discussions with many maritime technology companies such as MarineTraffic, Sternula, GSTS, Simac, syndeseas, and others. For the moment (November 2022), the team has signed dedicated NDAs for evaluating potential business transactions with Spire, Jua, and Sealab, which lay the ground for imminent business agreements. Additionally, the team is very close to closing other agreements with companies such as GSTS, sternula, and syndeseas.

Team & Why Us

The main development team comprises three highly experienced and passionate individuals, coming from three complementary sectors; i.e. oceanography, engineering/ informatics, and geography. This team includes three out of six co-founders, and holds ~ 70% of the company’s shares. Dr. Georgia Kalantzi is the CEO | CMO and also the R&D/ Innovation Manager. Mr. Eduardo Pena Vina is the CTO | CIO and the also AI Specialist. Mr. Konstantinos Karystinakis is the CFO | COO and also the Business Development Advisor.

Funding Needs

At this very early stage, we are looking into raising ~1.000.000,00 € for our global MVP scale-up and the respective market valuation.