Marine intelligence platform Greywing raises seed funding from investors like Flexport
Founded in 2019, Singapore-based Greywing was created to help ship operators and other members of the marine industry make critical decisions. It includes tools for managing crew changes, predictive notification of potential risks such as hacking, and updates to pandemic-related travel restrictions. Today, Greywing announced the launch of a new solution that will help vessel operators track carbon emissions created by crew changes, as well as $ 2.5 million in seed funding. Investors include Flexport, Transmedia Capital, Signal Ventures, Motion Ventures, Rebel Ventures, Y Combinator (Greywing was part of its winter 2021 batch) and Entrepreneur First.
Greywing now allows vessel operators to estimate the potential carbon impact of a crew change before it happens.
The carbon emissions tool collects data such as the current locations of individual crew members, their home ports, and potential route changes. When waypoints are entered, the platform searches for flights that crew members can take. The amount of carbon emissions a flight will create is listed along with its price, so that vessel operators can book flights that will reduce the total emissions created without significantly affecting the costs of an operation.
Managing Director Nick Clarke explained in an email that 3% of global emissions come from shipping, and about a third of these come from “scope 3” emissions, or the carbon footprint of factors outside of the world. ship fuel exits, including crew changes. Many ship operators are committed to reducing carbon emissions for ethical reasons; they must also comply with the 2030 and 2050 decarbonisation targets of the International Maritime Organization.
The release of the carbon emissions tool comes three months after Greywing launched Crew Change to help shipping companies manage COVID-19 testing, quarantine and other regulations for their crew members.
Greywing was formed in 2019 after founders Clarke and CTO Hrishi Olickel met at Entrepreneurs First in Singapore. Olickel told TechCrunch in an email that before joining the program, which matches potential co-founders, he “knew next to nothing about the shipping industry” because his background was in parametric insurance and robotics.
Greywing Founders Hrishi Olickel and Nick Clarke
“What attracted me to Greywing’s mission was Nick and the realization that shipping was a vital industry on the brink of digitalization where we could make a difference,” he said.
Greywing was created to reduce the amount of work that ship operators have to do when preparing for a trip. It extracts data from private and public sources and transforms it into user-friendly and navigable reports (the platform was designed to be mobile first). “Until our operating system was available, decision makers received all these critical details from separate channels and managed them across different platforms: email, rudimentary vessel tracking systems, HR ERP, phone calls or even Excel spreadsheets, ”Clarke said. “As you can imagine, it can be difficult to digest all these data points and turn them into actionable information,” especially when a bad decision can be costly, damaging to the environment, or dangerous to business members. ‘crew.
Olickel added that Greywing’s goal is to “move from idle information reporting, where the industry is currently, to real-time decision making and predictive alerts,” which is why the startup has built its carbon emissions and crew change tools.
The new funding round will allow Greywing to leverage more marine data sources and develop intelligent vessel management systems that will become more self-sufficient as the platform’s algorithms increase in complexity.
“Ultimately, this round of funding will help us use Greywing’s solution to spark a movement within the shipping industry so that we can tackle 1% of global carbon emissions that would otherwise remain intact,” Clarke said. “We are already working on deploying our solution on more than 2,000 vessels, which represents 3.5% of the global commercial fleet. This will remove over 230,000 tonnes of carbon from the Earth’s atmosphere; the equivalent of removing seven ships from our oceans.