Ankeri, an emerging leader in the modernization of marine cargo vessel and charter management, announced today a late-seed round of €2 million, led by Icelandic venture firm Frumtak Ventures. This new round will help Ankeri strengthen the development of its platform and increase its presence in key shipping hubs between North America, Europe and Asia. Ankeri has had a lot of early success and counts German shipping company Hapag-Lloyd among its customers.
Ankeri, whose mission is to provide customers with the data necessary to make sustainable transport decisions, offers a cloud-based platform which unifies disparate commercial and technical ship information, allowing cargo vessel teams, charterers and terminal operators to survey, benchmark, view and share validated vessel performance, fuel efficiency, carbon emissions and logistics data. The company, founded in 2016 by Kristinn Aspelund and Leifur Kristjansson, who each have over 15 years experience in the marine transport sector, previously raised €930k from local investors and grant funds including Iceland’s New Business Venture Fund and the Iceland Technology Development Fund.
“We are currently seeing immense friction in the global marine shipping sector, driven in large part by pandemic-related ripple effects, significant data blindspots due to antiquated manual, static processes and increasingly stringent decarbonization regulations,” says Ankeri CEO Kristinn Aspelund. “By modernizing and digitizing the ship charter processes, Ankeri brings significant transparency to the broad fluctuations in pricing and performance across vessels and carriers, which can equate to nearly €1 million in reduced total annual costs of operations. Perhaps most importantly, the collection and utilization of vessel fuel consumption and emissions data within our platform informs more sustainable vessel selection decisions by cargo charterers and serves as a turning point in meeting marine transport decarbonization goals.”
“We know that some of the largest challenges in the global supply chain are transport inefficiencies and poor systems interoperabilities that impede data collection and analysis, and drive up costs,” says Svana Gunnarsdóttir, Managing Partner at Frumtak Ventures. “Ankeri is helping to solve these problems technologically while incorporating into its solutions strong core financial and environmental sustainability values and data-driven advocacy for the adoption of greener energy solutions in the marine transport sector.”
90% of global shipped goods are transported by some 50,000 marine transport vessels. While the marine transport industry presents itself as the most environmentally-friendly in the shipping supply chain, it still represents 3% of total global greenhouse gas emissions and consumes more than €150bn in fossil fuel annually. Ankeri’s sophisticated algorithms, lightweight processes and API-driven integrations help charterers easily discover the cargo vessels most ideally suited, commercially and technically, for their cargo, with the highest energy efficiency and least carbon emissions.
