Signal Ventures: 2024 in Review

As the year draws to a close, we're excited to share a few highlights and reflections from Signal Ventures—the venture capital and strategic investment arm of the Signal Group.

Trends in Maritime Tech

This year has seen several major trends continue to shape the maritime space:

• Maritime M&A continues to grow: Despite the global slowdown in M&A activity, the maritime tech world has seen continued growth in mergers and acquisitions alongside increasing external interest from private equity and generalist VCs (see a visual demonstration of this trend from theDOCK below). This M&A activity represents both industry consolidation (e.g., ZeroNorth acquiring AlphaOri, Kpler acquiring Spire Maritime, or Sedna acquiring Nordic IT) and traditional players innovating through acquisition (e.g., DNV acquiring CyberOwl or Lloyd's Register purchasing OTG). Until fairly recently considered an industry with limited exit opportunities, we expect maritime M&A activity to strengthen in 2025 as capital markets’ appreciation for the potential of maritime tech continues to grow. 
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• Slow, steady progress towards decarbonisation: Funding has continued to flow into technologies enabling maritime emissions reduction, including successful funding rounds by OceanScore, GT Wings, Pyxis and Aether Fuels,. Despite this, actual implementation of decarbonisation tech has not yet taken place at the same scale. Green fuels account for less than 1% of total fuel used today, and alternative propulsion systems like wind-assistance remain well-funded Proofs of Concept likely years from industry-wide adoption. Shipping companies’ last-minute rush to meet FuelEU requirements before the Jan 2025 deadline for implementation personifies the industry’s slow rate of change, and highlights the key role regulators can play in enabling change and driving innovation across the industry. New ventures like Zero44, OceanScore and others are emerging as valuable partners, helping shipping companies manage these new and complex landscape of emissions regulations and align with their decarbonisation goals.

• Maritime digitalisation speeds up: The industry showed an unprecedented willingness to make use of data and connectivity to enable data-driven decision making this year, as smart ports are beginning to integrate digital twins and automating previously manual processes - such as Flowfox’s automated container release process - with a host of startups utilising the on-board connectivity enabled by low earth orbit satellite communications to optimise & improve vessel performance. All of our ventures support digitalisation in some way - from Kaiko’s AI-driven predictive maintenance to Harborlab’s end-to-end digitalisation of the port-cost management process - and we expect significant continued investment into digitalisation in 2025 as the maritime industry finds ways to optimise operations using AI.

• Voyage optimisation gets competitive: Combining both the industry’s decarbonisation ambitions & adoption of digitalisation, voyage optimisation was one of shipping’s first use cases for big-data. As a result, the voyage optimisation space has seen a continued increase in competition from both exciting, unproven startups (e.g., Toqua, Bearing AI, or Syroco) through to established incumbents (e.g., ZeroNorth, Sofar Ocean or DeepSea) competing to find an edge. The large number of players offering competing optimisation products, however, is likely to begin limiting the size of opportunity available in this space for companies unable to truly differentiate themselves from competing solutions.

• Autonomy finds its feet: Vessel autonomy is no longer a question of if but when. While current implementation mostly focuses on navigation support systems such as safety and collision avoidance, fully-autonomous vessels now appear a more achievable long-term goal than ever. Autonomy startups including Saronic ($175m), Orca AI ($23m), and Sea Machines ($12m) raised significant rounds this year, while Mythos AI has demonstrated successful full autonomy implementations in US ports. 2025 will see continued investment in competing autonomy technologies as regulatory frameworks evolve and adoption accelerates.

Signal Ecosystem Growth

As of December 2024, we have made 18 direct ventures in 10 countries, and an additional 24 indirect investments through our fund and venture studio investments. Our ecosystem partners have shown strong progress this year, with total portfolio ARR for our direct investments surpassing $25M in Q3—a testament to the incredible work of the founders we have partnered with. Key highlights include:

• Hoopo’s unpowered asset intelligence for supply-chain visibility has gone from strength to strength this year, announcing rollouts with several major lines, including a full-fleet deployment with ZIM and a recent partnership with Springshot to transform ground handling operations at airports.
• Harborlab’s software solution for port cost management raised a $16M Series A this year led by Atomico and expanded to dozens of new clients, including a rollout with Oldendorff.
• Closelink's cloud-based lubricant procurement platform grew GMV more than 5x this year, and announced their first major supplier integrations for seamless lubricant procurement.
• Flowfox's container-release automation platform has agreed a rollout  with Hapag-Lloyd and several major importers, complementing their recent successful funding round.
• DBX’s dry-bulk commodity analytics platform integrated satellite imagery analysis to accurately estimate commodity stockpiles held in dry bulk hubs, and more than doubled ARR this year.
• Our investments in Motion Ventures and Flagship Founders continued to expand our portfolio as our indirect investment grew to a further 24 startups across both portfolios in the maritime space.

In October, we announced an investment in Portcast’s Series A round—an exceptional team providing shippers with supply-chain visibility including industry-leading ETA/ETD prediction and port terminal visibility. See a full announcement of our Portcast investment here.

We're also excited to welcome Dylan Maxwell as an investment analyst in the Signal Ventures team. Dylan brings valuable experience from his time at BCG, where he worked on strategy and innovation projects across a range of industries, and holds a Master’s degree in Economics from Oxford University. He is working hard to uncover innovation in the maritime space and has already played a significant role in ensuring the success of the Portcast fundraising deal.

The Year Ahead

Looking ahead to 2025, Signal Ventures plans to continue empowering innovation across the maritime industry by working towards the following three goals:

1. Leveraging data partnerships to drive innovation through partnerships across the maritime industry.
2. Actively supporting founders in our ecosystem to scale our portfolio's impact and drive further ARR growth.
3. Broadening our investment scope to industries adjacent to maritime, including supply-chain and commodities tech opportunities. If you're building something transformative in these areas, we'd love to hear from you!

We're energised by the innovation we see in the maritime space and beyond and are committed to empowering the founders building towards these changes. Here's to more growth and collaboration in 2025.

Source: BCG
Source: TheDock
Source: EmissionLink (Columbia Group)
Source: DNV