Our Mission
What are we building to accomplish our vision?
Our mission is to build a fun, accessible place where anyone can make money with sustainability. We call this place the hub. Think Spotify for Sustainability (Sustainafy). The main currency on the hub are tools (songs) that empower shipowners (listeners) to solve their compliance and decarbonization issues, while allowing for suppliers (artists) to make money. Our main tool to empower shipowners and suppliers is the Decarbonizer. This hub provides all the services and solutions (tools) a shipowner or supplier could need, fully unburdening and empowering them. That is Sustainability on demand.
The Hub
We call the place we are building “the hub”. It connects supply and demand: suppliers, shipowners and ultimately investors. Anyone can trade information, goods, budget quotes, solutions or services on the hub - it could be anything anything. All these things being traded we call tools: they are ways to for the shipowner to achieve what it needs: compliance and a business case for decarbonization measures. At the same time it provides suppliers what they want: to sell equipment or services and make money. Shipowners can buy goods or services to ensure compliance with regulations, or sell their information if so desired. Investors can invest in hardware and make interest, or they can pay us (or others) for information. The principle is that we empower maritime clients to make money with sustainability.
Features
These features are by no means extensive or complete. They simply serve as a guideline on what to build and are already existing services by many other organizations. Our goal is not necessarily to (re)build these features. We prefer to work in-line with our values and collaborate with other suppliers to build upon their services and incorporate them into the hub. Nevertheless these features are needed to provide everything a shipowner needs to become sustainable, and hence should be included in an ‘ultimate version’ of the hub.
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Alternatively we could focus on providing engineering solutions, for example a vessel simulator for making sustainable vessels. This would be a SimCity like game to design, model, retrofit and create sustainable vessels.
Value Hypothesis - Reduce time/money for vessel creation, design but also in operations
Examples: Que$tor
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No shipowner likes to do administration. Especially not concerning management of CO2 taxes. With the upcoming incorporation of the shipping industry into the, this will become a problem for many shipowners. We can take care of all their worries. We can do all their CO2 administration and make sure that they are not concerned or bothered about anything, for a small fee of course. This would give us the opportunity to build upon Flind and use the information to point to shipowners where they can decarbonize. Again, we would not be doing something very different than what is already happening in the marketplace. We would simply create a different market model, more towards ‘Netflix’ models of subscription or freemium use models.
Examples - Green Maritime
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With the upcoming incorporation of the shipping industry into the EU ETS system, carbon becomes a commodity that shipowners have to trade in order to maintain their license to operate. Similar to the “Easy MRV” idea, we can help them. Instead however, we can focus on the marketplace and the trading, not the interface towards the vessel owner. Such marketplaces already exist but are generally speaking quite cumbersome to work with and have a high threshold to log into. We would simply make a “Bol.com” version of existing marketplaces like the Carbon Trade Exchange.
Examples - Carbonleap
More information on marketplaces:
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Taking Kongsberg as an inspiration, we could build a Floating Insights Dashboard (Flind) that helps vessels decarbonize and make informed decisions. Kongsberg already provides a lot: their solution provides instant and easy access to fleet overview, vessel specific dashboards and data analysis tools. In addition, through Kognifai Marketplace, customers have access to a large range of applications and services that can turn their data into business value. The focus of this product would be to further enhance fuel consumption usage, and not focus on reducing administration burdens as described above.
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Instead of focussing on products, we could simply become an intermediary for financing. We could focus on financing certain sustainable retrofits for vessels, for example financing shore power or installation of batteries. This would in effect be the implementation of a “Pay after Use” model, in which CAPEX investments for a clients are transformed into OPEX. This would be ideal for cash flow reasons and would be greatly benefitted considering we have multiple tools, a platform and community on which we can acquire feedback and customers.
Value Hypothesis - Reduce CAPEX investments for clients
We could provide ‘fuel’ for vessels. In effect, we would be asking a fixed amount of money per month and become responsible for a vessel’s fuel consumption. With the acquired knowledge on our platforms, we can easily decide if this is worth it for a vessel. If this is scalable, it would be ideally suited to create a cash-flow rich business.
The Tools
The hub is a collection of tools with an amazing filter (or AI), supported by a helpdesk run by humans where needed. It shares great similarity to our existing tool store, or other currently existing marketplaces for sustainability. These will be the basis for expanding our own tools and services, of which three are key.
1. The Decarbonizer
2. The RegulAitor
3. Custom Tool Building services (or simply consultancy)
The Decarbonizer and RegulAitor are special products that will require their own mission. They might one day develop into their own companies, in the case we find different market fit and can deviate from our purpose and mission. For now, only the Decarbonizer has a more elaborate mission or blueprint in order to show how all the pieces fit together.
The tool will include near-instant and scalable solutions to decarbonize their vessel and assist in administration (CII/EEXI), comparing investments based on the business case when upcoming rules and regulations are applied.
The Decarbonizer
Perhaps we will only have a single product in the future and no marketplace. Perhaps not. If we do however, it will be the Decarbonizer, as it is a key feature of not only everything what we do, but also what others do.
The Decarbonizer should be everything a client needs, a real-life virtual twin of ships or a clients’ fleet, that allows them to run simulations and determine the most cost-effective cost of compliance for any situation. The only thing we could add here, is a better user authentication environment, the ship database, plus the RegulAitor AI. All pictures etc. are kept in the Decarbonizer product. Ship simulation software can be used to make the product more appealing, simple or easy-to-use for clients, but is not a requirement for our end-client the shipowner, as it does not contribute to what it needs (compliance). Reporting and verification is more important.
