We met with the team of Marine Digital and asked them 5 questions about their StartUp. In the following interview you will find out what Marine Digital does, what kind of valuable proposition they offer, who their customers are and how a pilot project might look like:
Who is behind Marine Digital? Please tell us, who are your core-team?
We have a founding team of 3 persons: CTO/Founder Amir with the background in navigation apps development, CMO/Founder Alex with several success stories in b2b industry software projects, I have also mixed background of IT, Banking and Logistics. This combination works great, we can bring and explain a lot to the industry companies.
Initially we had the understanding that we don’t have all the knowledge and expertise inside the founding team and started building advisory board and today I’m proud to work with such an experts: Meriam Chaal is a former naval safety officer from Tunisia and at the same time a scientist working on her autonomous shipping PhD in Aalto University (FN) Alex Sushilov is also a former Naval officer and the CEO of Unimars group with a huge network in the industry and understanding of IT specifics and successful sales cases in marine industry. Konstantin Matveev is a chairman of CNITA and head of charts division at ELCOME. So we have a pretty strong and industry focused setup.
What exactly does Marine Digital do and what is your USP?
In a simple terms we make a vessel’s digital twin, we have a special hardware solution for the old analog vessels to transform them, and using modern Machine Learning algorithms we put this digital twin model into the weather and water parameters forecast and predicting the fuel consumption of the vessel, analysing if there are more optimal routes to reduce this consumption and corresponding emission of CO2.
Our USP is the complexity of the solution: we bring together route planning, e-charts delivery with PAYS technology, ML-algorithms and online telemetric data streaming.
Ship Management company or the Ship owner today having from 4 to 8 different systems to work with vessel performance and navigation. Its not easy to make a decision when several different systems tell you different things in relation to the course, speed, draft trim, etc.
We are here to have all these functions in 1 place and with a better telemetric data set and better calculations that leads to more accurate predictions and a bigger emission reduction effect.
Who are your customers and what do you offer them?
Our customers are ship management companies and sometimes shipowners. We offer them to test the digital twin functionality for a couple of months to understand the benefits of the system. 2 months on average is enough for ML algorithms to be adjusted for the particular vessel specifics and after that fuel consumption efficiency could be easily managed.
The complex offer includes the online telemetric data streaming, PAYS – e-charts delivery method, performance monitoring and next year the route planner with the weather and several other forecasts will be available.
We also work on the maintenance prediction vector, because sometimes the boiling engine onboard of the tanker or chemical vessel, HVAC systems on a RoRo vessel might consume even more than the main engine and with the same solution we are working to normalise this.
Are you looking for pilot customers and if yes, how could pilot project with you look like?
We are interested in new pilots to launch the solution with the different types of the vessels in different production surroundings. The pilot project works like this: we discuss with the company the specifics of their fleet and current requests, provide the questionnaire related to the pilot vessel setup and after these preparations are finished we arrive to the port/dock and install the digital twin hardware within 1 day. After the installation together with the company we monitor the performance, monitor the result of the ML algorithms calculations and after 2-3 months we can sit and discuss the results.
What makes the location Lübeck special to you?
For us as for the commercial company it’s a nice balance: cost of the company maintaince, beautiful Innenstadt and Travemünde districts, around 40 min to Hamburg, 3 h to Berlin and around 6 hours to Rotterdam. We see a good potential cooperation cases with TH Lübeck and with several local companies.
Source: tzl.de
