Smart Ship Hub (SSH), a Singapore-headquartered business-to-business (B2B) software as a service (SaaS) maritime digital platform, said Monday it has raised pre series round of $2.5 million led by Ideaspring Capital and StartupXseed ventures.

“Digital platforms will play a fundamental role in disrupting maritime legacy processes. Inefficient and legacy workflows in ships and shore is gradually giving way to automated remote management,

“This fund raise will allow us to pass on more value to our customers globally. Customers will now have captive performance centre for a fraction of the cost they incur today. Ship owners, operators, charter parties can get digital upgrade for ‘zero’ capex, allowing them to unblock their capital and upgrade more vessels,” said Joy Basu, Founder of SSH.

SSH is a ready to deploy digital platform for global maritime logistics. It is disrupting the maritime industry the way avionics did in airline industry. Cloud based and on demand, SSH provides “unified platform and a single source of truth” for ship owners, ship operators, charter parties, maritime insurers, port authorities. The platform caters for merchant ships, naval ships, oil rigs, river going barges and fishing vessels.

According to the statement, Global maritime, despite being the largest mode of transport, suffers from operational inefficiencies, lack of visibility, transparency leading to commercial leakages. Ship owners, operators, chartering agencies, insurance companies are now focused on technology backed smarter processes to ensure “high vessel uptime, sea worthiness and predictability” with digital systems.

SSH’s “ship-to-shore and shore-to-ship” based management of fleet using smart sensors, internet of things (IOT), big data is saving substantial operational costs while enhancing voyage efficiencies. The digital platform is helping predict possible machinery down time, malfunctioning, identify performance deviations, vessel routes to improve voyage and vessel performance.

Meanwhile, its “marine insights” is a unique maritime big data platform providing actionable intelligence, smart alerts and performance advisory for entire fleet using millions of records.

With SSH, global customers are able to achieve their target of ” minimal breakdown maintenance”, “optimum fuel utilization”, “staying in total compliance including for emissions”, ” optimize costs with condition based maintenance” and a much higher level of ” voyage control”.

Its “performance advisory” feature is also reducing number of incidents for these ships while saving maintenance and fuel costs. Future ready maritime companies are helping in creation of a connected ecosystem: connected ships, shared services (routes, capacity, procurement) and “pay per use” model with SSH digital.

“Ideaspring Capital is very happy to be part of SSH’s growth and its journey towards being the digital platform of choice for global maritime companies. As a venture capital firm, we are focused on organizations that are into IOT, machine learning (ML), deep learning, big data analytics, augmented reality, virtual reality, cyber security, computer vision and we have seen SSH are leveraging these technologies through their world-class platform. We are very impressed with the team and the product” said Naganand Doraswamy, Managing Partner, Ideaspring Capital.

StartupXseed ventures Designated Partner Ravi Thakur said :”StartupXseed is a sector agnostic fund with investments from SaaS to space (tech), including the areas of cyber security, Semicon, artificial intelligence (AI)/ML, drones and new frontier startups in India with a global focus. SSH is a early growth stage company, we are particularly impressed with their product and marquee customers base developed globally in a very short span of time.”

StartupXseed ventures Managing partner BV Naidu also noted SSH has a unique advantage of a powerful promoter team of successful maritime professionals, Singapore headquarters and a strong technology team, and they are glad to have partnered as they disrupt global maritime domain.

Singapore’s ShipsFocus and Quest Ventures launch Maritime Fund, with first close at $7.5M