Ankeri raises $2.3m in seed funding from Frumtak Ventures
90% of global shipped goods are transported by some 50,000 marine transport vessels. While the marine transport industry presents itself as the most environmentally-friendly in the shipping supply chain, it still represents 3% of total global greenhouse gas emissions and consumes more than $150bn in fossil fuel annually.
Ankeri is an Icelandic company trying to tackle this by empowering customers with the data necessary to make sustainable transport decisions. They just announced a late-seed round of €2 million, led by Frumtak Ventures. This new round will help Ankeri strengthen the development of its platform and increase its presence in key shipping hubs between North America, Europe and Asia.
The company, which was founded in 2016 by Kristinn Aspelund and Leifur Kristjansson, previously received grants from the Technology Development Fund and raised a $500k seed round from NSA Ventures.
“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,” says Ankeri CEO Kristinn Aspelund.
He went on to say that “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.”
“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,” says Svana Gunnarsdóttir, Managing Partner at Frumtak Ventures. “Ankeri is helping to solve these problems technologically while incorporating into its solutions strong core financial and environmental sustainability values and data-driven advocacy for the adoption of greener energy solutions in the marine transport sector.”
