Eyeing an opportunity in a rapidly consolidating space, New York-based venture capital firm Communitas Capital has taken a stake in energy analytics company Vortexa. Prices and the size of the stake have not been revealed.
The founders of Communitas Capital are well-placed in making their investment. They are Tom Glocer, lead board director at Morgan Stanley and former CEO at Thomson Reuters, Duncan Niederauer, the former CEO of the New York Stock Exchange and partner at Goldman Sachs and Doug Atkin, the former CEO of Instinet, a data analytics company owned by Nomura.
While CEO at Thomson Reuters, Glocer oversaw one of the largest news and information organisations in the world, including its financial terminal business before it became Refinitiv as part of the spin-off transaction led by a Blackstone consortium in 2018 and later sold to London Stock Exchange in an all-share transaction valued at $27bn, with many tech experts thinking something similar could happen again with some of the aggregated maritime analytics conglomerates that have been formed in recent months.
Glocer commented, “The traditional financial information networks were primarily based on the aggregation and distribution of market data. Vortexa is the first information platform of its kind using advanced AI to create a real-time fundamental view of the multi-trillion-dollar energy market. The speed in which Vortexa is attracting and working with the top energy traders in the market is a clear indication of something immensely valuable in the making.”
Fabio Kuhn, CEO of Vortexa, said: “Tom is a true legend in the financial information and news industry. In the game of basketball, our partnership would be the equivalent to having Michael Jordan joining the team – and I could not be more excited about the game plan we will build together.”
Maritime tech consolidation is happening at a rapid clip in the opening months of 2023, something that was predicted in Splash’s annual tech forecast.
Thomas Zanzinger, CEO of Ocean Technologies Group, told Splash 2023 might be the year where maritime’s siloed nature finally gets solved.
“The big breakthroughs I see coming through this year are in bringing a hitherto disparate technology landscape together. By integrating applications and overlaying multiple data sets we will start to identify opportunities for incremental gains across operations,” Zanzinger said.
Linked to this, Olga Kadeshnikova, customer success leader at data provider Spire Maritime, was one of many people polled by Splash who argued that consolidation in the maritime tech industry in the form of more acquisitions will be a very important trend to keep an eye on in 2023.
Vessel tracking data platforms have become hot property in 2023. New York-headquartered S&P Global last month joined the race to offer clients real-time shipping data, announcing the acquisition of UK-based technology firm Tradenet, which has been the long-time developer of the Market Intelligence Network (MINT) live vessel tracking platform that S&P Global has exclusively sold for years.
In February commodities data firm Kpler acquired two well-known ship tracking brands, MarineTraffic and FleetMon.
Earlier this month, Boston-based shipping software company Veson Nautical sealed a deal to acquire UK online pricing platform VesselsValue.
