UK-based maritime tech start-up Spot Ship, which provides digital services to shipbrokers, has struck a new partnership with data-driven communications platform Sedna.
Newly formed partnership
Founded in 2017 US-based Sedna harnesses data embedded in emails to help companies in business critical decision making and boasts a growing number of partners and top tier industry customers.
“We’ve got a new partnership with Sedna – we’ll announce more in the coming weeks. Joint customers will be able to use our 99 plus percent accuracy to exploit their open position and cargo data within emails in the Sedna system,” James Kellett, Co-Founder & Co-CEO of SpotShip.
Sedna’s customers list includes the likes of Oldendorff, Glencore, Norden, and Pacific Basin.
Kellett sees the new partnership with Sedna as a groundbreaking development for SpotShip, having grown from just six people a couple years ago to 36 today.
“Now at 36 people, with deals like the one with Sedna, suddenly we have bomb-burst onto the scene and people have started recognizing us in the market, which is it’s super exciting,” he enthuses.
Business growth
SpotShip is growing its business from that one is designed to assist shipbrokers to also one that can provide data to other businesses and technology platforms.
Kellett explains that Spot Ship deals with three types of data – proprietary data such as fixtures, satellite tracking data, and a static database. The company has been building up the static database both acquiring data from other vendors and through its own research with a team in Manila, with Kellett noting what customers want is a database that offers 100% completeness, rather than say 60% complete, which is already available in the market.
“A static database sounds boring, but getting a static database to play with the other two types of data allows you to make the decisions in shipping that everybody is trying to make.”
It’s been a story of incremental improvement and Kellett says that over the last two years its platforms have got half a percent better every week. “And six months ago, that wasn’t leading to much traction in the market,” he admits, however, in the last month SpotShip’s revenues are up four times. He believes that with the constant incremental improvements it has now reached a “buying point”.
Spot Ship’s main sales focus will continue to be the shipbroker market hopefully supported by larger partnership type deals. “We are still utterly committed to our broker business. The force from sales team is focused, almost to the exclusion of all else on brokers at the moment. My hope is that we will see one or two development, partner type contracts with large owners and that will enable us to refine our offering very quickly into that owner space,” Kellett explains.
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Source: SeatradeMaritime
