Digitizing maritime technical operations: Our €2M seed round and what's next

Dear customers, supporters, and friends,

I am thrilled and proud to announce that Kaiko Systems has raised a €2M seed round from a group of reputable investors including Schoeller Holdings, Vineta Ventures, A Round Capital, Flagship Founders as well as industry experts such as Clasen Rickmers and Justus Kniffka.

This funding will propel our company growth forward, and enable us to serve you with even stronger empowerment to your crews and technical teams. Before looking in the future, I would like to take a moment to look back with you on how things have developed over the past 2 years since our establishment:

From first co-development to scaling up 

Already when Eddy and I decided to embark on this journey, it was clear for us that we wanted to co-develop our product together with an innovative shipping company. And in Auerbach Schifffahrt, we found that partner that provided us with great insights from the start. 

We decided that we wanted to stay close to the users on board and ashore. Thanks to this, we realized from the very beginning that excellent user experience design was the key thing that we could contribute to an industry ripe for change. We set out to make shipping safer, smarter and more collaborative.

With this principle as the core of our product, our app now was able to save crews 50% of time spent on inspections, and with the dashboard shore teams immediately react to findings, identify trends & prevent incidents before they occur. 

Fast forward to today, we were able to earn the trust from USC Barnkrug, Marlow Navigation, Columbia Shipmanagement, C Transport Maritime, ASSC and more (look out for further news!).

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Where do we see the industry heading?

According to research done by Thetius, COVID has accelerated the digital transformation in shipping by 3 years.

Naturally, this had a big impact especially on technical management. With remote class surveys being more and more common and SIRE 2.0 going mobile, we see clear indications that the times of printed paper and excel sheets for inspections and maintenance are over. After all, digitized inspections increase the quality of work, save time for the crews, and allow shore teams to operate with confidence. 

It means more though. Any manual work onboard can be digitized and made into checklists with visualized guidance. This means increased efficiency in all the day-to-day manual workflows, better crew welfare, and vastly simplified communication time between shore and the ship, reducing the risk of human error and incidents. And, this is what we are determined to bring to the market.

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What does this funding round mean to our customers?

We believe that the greatest value we can provide to our customers is to build dedicated, best-in-class workflow digitization tools that deliver value from day one. The funding gives us the necessary resources to deliver on our promises.

1. Enhance the offering

We have built a successful product that allows crews to plan, conduct, and upload inspections in one platform while enabling shore teams to identify findings immediately. In the upcoming months, we plan to further expand the functionality for shore teams to leverage this standardized data set at scale.

2. Expanding the team

It is the strong execution of our team that took us where we are today. We are a diverse team from different countries around the world and everyone with unique skill sets and areas of expertise. In the upcoming months, we are expecting to double the size of the team and operating even faster, at an even higher quality standard.

3. Reaching new shores

After achieving strong traction in Europe, we are experiencing more and more interest internationally. To be reliable partners for our customers, we believe in being present and engaging in local ecosystems.

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You give us purpose and focus!

We started the company during a time of uncertainty and crisis. Together with you, we have not only managed to create a company from the ground up, but also build products that solve real-world issues. We couldn’t have done it without all our partners, investors and customers, who have given us important feedback and continuously supported us at every stage of the way.

Looking forward, we will continue to strive to deliver best-in-class modern tools to enable safer, smarter, and more collaborative technical operations.

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Fabian Fussek

Co-Founder & CEO

Kaiko Systems