Douglas: Vasiliy Kotylevskiy is determined to bring ship chartering into the 21st century. The founder of OpenSea.pro tells Maritime CEO that chartering, which migrated from telex to fax and onto email and latterly Skype and WhatsApp over recent decades, is set for “a new level of evolution”.
“Our aim is to bring latest technologies into chartering and finally help every participants to become more effective, spend less time on browsing hundreds of emails and upgrade people’s usual tools,” Kotylevskiy says from his office in Scotland.
OpenSea.pro is developing a marketplace for shipowners, charterers and brokers. It is a web-based application, which includes instant search of suitable ships or cargoes; all cargo positions available with freight rates; the possibility to discuss and fix charter-party in embedded chat; actual positions visible on a world map; transparent reputation of users; freight analytics and trends.
“Our market survey had shown that almost all participants of the freight market are faced with a lack of information, difficulties in searching for new clients, infinite spam and a need to be constantly online. Besides, every decision should be 100% accurate, it means that in a huge flow of information it’s pretty hard to find relevant info and every second counts. That is why most professionals use a bunch of additional services like analytical researches, ship’s trackers, different software for every particular need. This also creates great pressure and eventually causes stress. We are going to change it and bring back the joy in a daily workflow,” Kotylevskiy says.
OpenSea.pro was launched in June 2014 and already has a few hundred registered users.
“Right now our team is working on analytics. Then we are going to develop a charter-party creation tool and release a mobile application,” Kotylevskiy concludes.
