Ankeri raised €2M in late-seed funding from Frumtak Ventures

Over 90% of global shipped goods are transported by some 50,000 marine transport vessels. Even though shipping by sea is reasonably environmentally friendly, marine transportation still represents 3% of total global greenhouse gas emissions and consumes more than €150bn in fossil fuel annually.

Ankeri, is a Reykjavik, Iceland,-based startup that is all about making the data needed to to calculate fuel efficiency, carbon emissions, and logistics data for those maritime logistics.

It says its cloud-based platform unifies all this disparate commercial and technical ship information, applies algorithms and helps charterers discover the highest energy efficiency and least carbon emissions options.

It’s now raised €2M in late seed funding from Frumtak Ventures to help the marine transport industry reach global transparency and decarbonization goals.

This new round will help Ankeri strengthen its presence in North America, Europe and Asia. Ankeri counts German shipping company Hapag-Lloyd among its customers.

The company, founded in 2016 by Kristinn Aspelund and Leifur Kristjansson, previously raised €930k from local investors and grant funds including Iceland’s New Business Venture Fund and the Iceland Technology Development Fund.

Aspelund said: “We are currently seeing immense friction in the global marine shipping sector, driven in large part by pandemic-related ripple effects, significant data blindspots due to antiquated manual, static processes, and increasingly stringent decarbonization regulations. By modernizing and digitizing the ship charter processes, Ankeri brings significant transparency to the broad fluctuations in pricing and performance across vessels and carriers, which can equate to nearly €1 million in reduced total annual costs of operations.”

“Perhaps most importantly, the collection and utilization of vessel fuel consumption and emissions data within our platform informs more sustainable vessel selection decisions by cargo charterers and serves as a turning point in meeting marine transport decarbonization goals,” he added.  

Napa, Q88 and AXS are perhaps the closest competitors, however, this area of transport (like many long running supply chain, construction and industrial processes) is really still mostly manual, with plenty off spreadsheets, email and old habits of working.

Svana Gunnarsdóttir, Managing Partner at Frumtak Ventures said: “We know that some of the largest challenges in the global supply chain are transport inefficiencies and poor systems interoperabilities that impede data collection and analysis, and drive up costs. Ankeri is helping to solve these problems technologically while incorporating into its solutions strong core financial and environmental sustainability values.”