• Greek maritime startup Harbor Lab secured €6.1 million, one of the biggest tickets in the history of maritime technology.
• VentureFriends and Speedinvest led the round, with additional investors including theDOCK, Signal Ocean Ltd, Motion Ventures, TecPier, Innoport and Charge VC.
• The Harbor Lab platform streamlines disbursement account processes and identifies discrepancies, reducing port call expenses by approximately 6% per port, thereby reducing administrative costs by up to 75%.
Greek maritime startup Port laboratory will use the funds to further develop its shipping disbursement analysis software that helps businesses by automatically calculating and evaluating port expenses against port rates in real time.
Port expenses are the second largest cost after bunkers for a shipping company and amount to more than $120 billion each year.
“Many digitalization gaps have been closed in the shipping sector in recent years, but the disbursement process in shipping companies is often inefficient and administratively cumbersome, with little visibility for the ship operator. vessel on the actual costs associated with port calls. Harbor Lab’s DA tool addresses these issues and can save operators approximately $2,000 per call when a vessel operates in the spot market, and $1,500 when chartered on time,” said Antonis Malaxianakis, CEO and founder of Harbor Lab, in a statement.
Acquire talents to develop its flagship products
Currently with 57 employees, Harbor Lab has 600 vessels with disbursement accounting managed through the platform, with over 3,500 registered agents and sellers.
The Athens-based company now plans to use the funds to acquire talent to develop its core products, with the aim of bringing greater transparency to the maritime industry.
Since its launch in March 2020, Harbor Lab has received positive feedback from end users with over 10,000 port calls processed using the software, with customers reporting greater visibility into port costs, faster processes and savings of approximately 6% per stopover as cost differentials are reduced. identified, the company said.
According to Venture Friends, although shipping is an old-school industry, that will eventually change.
“This can only happen from within and Antonis, the founder, has extensive experience in the shipping sector in the past, being responsible for port expenses in various shipping companies. VentureFriends is a founder-led fund and that’s what got us excited in the first place, along with the high barriers to entering a challenging, unique but largely non-digitized sector like the maritime sector. We are confident that with the new funding round and the support the team has access to, they will discover and solve more problems in the future,” Venture Friends told The Recursive in a statement.
This new investment will also allow the Greek company to further disrupt the $200 billion maritime disbursements industry.
“We are very pleased to further support Harbor Lab in its quest to expand globally while establishing its presence in major maritime hubs like Copenhagen and Singapore. We also look forward to seeing the product grow with the use of machine learning to digitize ports around the world, making shipping more efficient,” said Apostolos Apostolakis of Venture Friends.
“Harbour Lab is one of the few companies capable of fundamentally disrupting the key operating principles of a massive industry. By streamlining port calls and operations across the world, Harbor Lab generates significant value for shipping lines and port stakeholders. We couldn’t be happier to support the team on their exciting journey,” added Philip Specht, Partner at Speedinvest.
