August 29, 2019

Podcast: Building Sustainable Global Trade

Nautilus Labs CEO, Matt Heider, talks sustainable global trade and advancing efficiency in maritime on ARK Invest’s podcast FYI.

On this podcast, Matt Heider, CEO of Nautilus Labs, joined ARK Invest’s Research Analyst, James Wang, to talk about Nautilus’ approach to advancing the efficiency of ocean commerce and making global trade sustainable.

Matt explains how Nautilus delivers technology to help shipping companies minimize fuel consumption, maximize operational efficiency, and optimize fleet performance. By arming ship owners and operators with real-time predictive decision support, Nautilus is reducing greenhouse gas emissions and making global trade sustainable.

More than 90% of the world’s trade is carried by sea, and today ocean shipping is the third largest emitter of greenhouse gas emissions. Left unchecked, it will account for 20% of GHG emissions by 2050. While the industry consumes over $100 billion dollars of fuel every year, up to 30% of it can be saved.

For ship owner-operators, a reliance on manually collected and analyzed data makes it difficult to optimize fleet performance in real-time. By unifying data in a single analytics platform, Nautilus provides continuous and predictive insight into vessel performance. This drives increased revenues via improved vessel remarketing and TCE rates, as well as reduced operational and fuel costs over the course of each voyage.

Leveraging machine learning and artificial intelligence, our software enables our clients to monitor, understand, and optimize vessel performance across their fleets to maximize ROI on their investment. Long-term, this will help drive awareness and reduction of fuel consumption across the industry, and in turn make ocean shipping more sustainable.

At Nautilus, our software is built on the same foundation as AI is used in other industries – a lot of data combined with software that is designed to learn. The most basic example of this is our ability to predict a vessel’s speed and consumption. Our system is able to do this by learning from an aggregated dataset that includes the historical consumption of a range of different ships operating in different draft conditions along different routes in different weather patterns. We then ask it a simple question: how much fuel will any given ship consume in a certain voyage condition? When should a vessel receive maintenance actions like a hull or propeller cleaning? And it’s been proven to be much more accurate at answering that question repeatably than a human with a spreadsheet.

The application of this type of insight to more advanced algorithms becomes all the more interesting as we get into things like a TCE-maximizing speed instruction. It’s important to our clients that we have unique technology, along with an engineering and data science organization uniquely positioned to build increasingly compelling software. Recently, we’ve been working to assess precisely how effective we’ve become at predictive analysis to help us quantify the impact of our software on our clients’ businesses. In one specific case, we looked at a voyage where we used our TCE-based speed optimization to predict the financial outcome of a leg. Upon finishing the analysis, our platform was 70% more accurate at predicting the financial results from the voyage than their existing tools. Nautilus partners closely with its dozen clients like Eagle Bulk Shipping, Teekay, Dorian LPG, and Eastern Pacific Shipping.

Tune into this podcast by ARK Invest and learn more.

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