Frank Coles, the former CEO of Transas (Acquired by Wartsila) joins Marine Digital team as strategic advisor to accelerate the startup development of the software technology focused on vessel data transparency and industry climate change mitigation targets. Marine Digital is an early stage deep-tech company supported by Technology Transfer Agency (WTSH.de), Investment Bank (IB-SH.de) of the Schleswig-Holstein state of Northern Germany, APX.vc and EU based private investors. The company is headquartered in the maritime city of Kiel. Marine Digital is a company focused on automated vessel data acquisition hardware technology and artificial intelligence algorithms for route planning targeting the vessel emission and fuel consumption reduction goals.
Frank Coles: “The Marine Digital project is unique and exciting and I am excited to be able to participate in the journey towards solving the challenge of data acquisition on board the ship and the smart use of this data. Marine Digital will challenge the status quo because none of the current solutions have quite mastered the integrated solution. Too many of the solutions available today still have too many human elements attached, Marine Digital is seeking to eliminate this. We all see the words automation, artificial intelligence, algorithms and fuel efficiency, this is the first time I have seen it mean something.”
"I believe that the experienced and ambitious technological team of Marine Digital couldn't find a better partner than Frank, who is a wise maritime expert with domain knowledge not only in the vessel operations, but also in satellite and wireless communications as well as in marine law. The process of the data acquisition hardware and AI navigation development as we believe one of the major mass market solutions supporting the climate change mitigation goals and this is a tough challenge because of its complexity - multidimensional data layers, terabytes of data sets, heavy industry surroundings of the vessel, which is by the way almost a fully metal object, so it's great to be on the same page of understanding the whole thing with Frank from the first minute." - says Ivan Ladan, CEO of Marine Digital GmbH