Cargo ships calling at a commercial port incur costs called ‘disbursements’ and ‘port call costs’. These may include port charges, towage and navigation charges. It’s a complex patchwork and all ports operate their own processes, many of them in spreadsheets. Global cost from ports, for all ships, is over 220 billion dollars per year.
Now, a Greek shipping software startup we last covered when it raised a €6.1 million seed round — Harbor Lab — went on to raise a $16 million Series A funding round led by European VC Atomico.
Harbor Lab says the cost incurred by a ship’s ports is the second largest expense for commercial vessels after fuel, coming in at around $2.2 million per vessel per year.
The company claims its platform can streamline these costs and reduce the margin of error in billing errors and overpayments from 20% to just 3% per port call.
Antonis Malaxianakis told me in a call: “I was a potential user of the software we created. I have manually audited over 20,000 disbursement accounts, so I knew all aspects of the business and the ins and outs of the industry. So for us, once we had the seed funding and we could afford the software engineering and we could focus, on a very tight roadmap, we were very confident of success.”
He added: “We have a war. But in the shipping industry, we have fares that go up because of that and the extra risk. We are very focused on doing a proper KYC due diligence on all participating parties. Both ships and agents located all over the world. When the war was fought overnight, we had to sanction 100 overnight participants.”
Atomico partner Ben Blume told me, “We’re looking at basic logistics processes and moving things around the planet. With that lens, we came to Harbor Lab. There are a few different stages in commercial maritime travel that each need pieces of software around them… This company felt like the most exciting one to be involved with.”
He also said: “I think in Antonis you have a really visionary founder, someone who just brings a tremendous amount of energy to the business he’s building, as well as deep industry experience.”
New environmental legislation and various geopolitical crises make dealing with the complications of cargo transportation a more pressing issue.
Harbor Lab already has shipping giants Great Eastern Shipping, Oldendorf, Vesson Nauticaland 90 PoE as customers and partners.
Seed investor Apostolos Apostolakis, partner at VentureFriends, told me: “Having been one of the first institutional investors in Harbor Lab, we were convinced early on of its potential and because it was so clearly articulated by Antonis. We’ve been fortunate to experience firsthand the steady progress toward this vision, and what’s more, after this new round we’re even more excited about what the future holds.”
With existing investors Notion Capital, VentureFriends, SpeedInvest and The Dock, and new investors Endeavor Catalyst and maritime VC TMV, the round takes total funding for the Greek startup to around $22.5 million.
