Clarksons-backed Sea/ platform is rapidly scaling up to offer something unique in the fragmented shipping digital universe.
The Sea/ platform focuses on delivering an intelligent marketplace for fixing freight. The SaaS platform develops software and digital applications for the maritime industry pre-fixture and at-fixture to enhance the way shipping professionals work. Over the past two months Sea/, now led by Peter Schrøder, has been busy on the acquisition trail, adding Swedish freight contract management platform Chinsay, and then Polish software development company Setapp.
Schrøder joined Sea/ as CEO this April, bringing a wealth of experience spanning more than 20 years in the technology world across a wide variety of industries including telecoms, gaming, publishing and, most recently, shipping. His role as chief digital officer of Maersk Tankers yielded numerous innovations including the creation of ZeroNorth, the vessel optimisation platform.
Schrøder says shipping digitalisation needs to come from vendors as it is not something charterers or owners are developing themselves, due to the size of investments needed and the new competencies needed.
Said vendors need deep domain knowledge, Schrøder says, as shipping is so complex that even the best artificial intelligence out there is not capable of delivering.
“Historically owners and charterers have not had access to a lot of digital talent,” Schrøder tells Maritime CEO.
“We want to hold the charterer’s hand and then work with the whole ecosystem, to be an open market place,” Schrøder says. Sea/ includes data from other providers to build up a greater, all encompassing picture for decision-makers.
“It is all about tying it together so it is a seamless workflow for a charterer, broker, owner platform,” Schrøder says.
To be truly data driven companies have to have strong processes to learn from past processes, not a culture of fix and forget that can be seen in some operations departments at certain charterers, Schrøder argues. This is something that requires a change in mindset plus the necessary tools to ensure people have access to the right data at the right time.
Sea/ today has 87 charterers on its platform, more than 500 brokers and several hundred owners. It is used for 34,000 fixtures per year across a variety of markets, including more than 80% of the seaborne iron ore market.
Good Day, thanks for this interesting article however me as a daily user of this software solution must say its a very uncomfortable tool to use. In addition in also question the amount of fixture really getting done via the platform as of my experience its only used as the storage room for the data but the fixture does happen on the “normal” way.
Hi Paul,
Thanks for sharing your feedback. We pride ourselves in having quality customer support services.
If you ever face difficulties with using Sea/ please get in touch with support@sea.live, we will be happy to assist.