ZeroNorth turns two: a promising journey of exponential growth, strategic partnerships, and impactful collaboration

On 18 June 2022, ZeroNorth turned two years old. The last two years have been a thrilling journey marked by the rapid growth of the company, which has, since its funding, actively taken steps towards enabling greener global trade and creating a more sustainable industry. 

Progress towards the decarbonisation of the maritime industry is highly dependent on the widespread adoption of a range of different strategies, particularly the uptake of digital solutions, as they can start delivering efficiencies, fuel savings, and carbon emissions reductions immediately. By championing these data-driven optimisation solutions for global trade, forming strategic partnerships, and making targeted and tactical upgrades to our suite of products, ZeroNorth has become an undisputed leader in the maritime digital technology space and has gained the trust of some of the major and most highly reputed global trade industry players.

The two-year anniversary offers a great opportunity to look back and acknowledge some of ZeroNorth’s milestones over the last two years to celebrate the achievements of the business while acknowledging the work that still needs to be done.

The right partnerships and acquisitions

For businesses to thrive, it’s important to partner and work with the right organisations. ZeroNorth started 2021 by partnering with leading global satellite and data company Spire Maritime, with the aim of enriching the ZeroNorth Platform with Spire’s world leading maritime AIS and weather data. More partnerships followed throughout the year, and we teamed up with the Baltic Exchange, Monjasa and Chartworld, to name a few, all with a view to improving the outputs and recommendations of the Platform by using the industry’s best market data as a key input.

Simultaneously, in line with commercial growth objectives, we have made strategic acquisitions in the last year. In 2021, we acquired the maritime industry’s leading vessel performance company Propulsion Dynamics. Alongside the historical pedigree of Propulsion Dynamics’ products and services, we were also able to power up our platform with more than 25,000 historical and current vessel fuel consumption models spanning the last two decades of ship operations. Soon after, we started 2022 with the news that we hadacquired ClearLynx, boosting the marine fuel (bunker) procurement and optimisation side of the platform.

Smarter and more granular optimisation

Through these partnerships and access to more data, we are now generating a measurable and large positive impact on shipping’s environmental performance. In 2021, the ZeroNorth platform prevented 218,000 tonnes CO2 from being emitted into the atmosphere – the same as taking 47,000 cars off the road.

This achievement would not have been possible without the important product development updates we have released in the past 24 months. In 2021, we launched our integrated weather routing solution, which enables every route created in Optimise to automatically consider weather factors for safety and commercial upside.

Meanwhile, acknowledging the growing need for compliance with impending regulations on carbon intensity within shipping, we launched a Carbon Intensity Indicator (CII) analysis and optimisation solution within our platform to provide owners and operators with the transparency and insight required to accurately analyse, forecast and proactively improve a vessel’s CII rating. With CII rating thresholds set to become increasingly stringent towards 2030, our unique depth of analysis and comprehensive level of integration helps ship operators prepare for a profitable and sustainable future.

In addition to this, in 2022 we also launched our new High-Risk Areas feature to allow ship operators to keep their vessels and crews safe and compliant with insurance policy requirements. Two further updates to bunker and speed optimisation helped ensure that vessels were using fuel efficiently (reflecting the use of scrubbers onboard) and sailing at optimum speeds. Most recently, we also added a new warranted speed functionality so that tanker and dry bulk shipping customers can compare our variable speed optimisations with a route optimised with fixed speeds. This helps operators make more informed decisions as to the earnings of a vessel and voyage.

These upgrades are key to empower the industry and at ZeroNorth, there is a strong belief that power doesn’t come from data alone but from uniting high-quality data with the right analytics and integration capabilities to turn it into actions that owners and operators can take.

Working together to create impact

We are focused on solving key challenges impeding sustainability within shipping. One of these obstacles is the lack of collaboration and so, to accelerate decarbonisation, we helped to found an industry working group for immediate action called Impact Today. Over the past several months, representatives from 14 organisations, including Cargill, UltraBulk, Western Bulk, Maersk Tankers, Lloyd’s Register, Norden, EuroNav, Siglar Carbon and Q88 have met across numerous workshops to address shipping’s decarbonisation challenges and find working solutions.

Working together, Impact Today has publicly communicated the need for the shipping industry to improve data quality if it is to unlock the benefits of data-enabled emissions reductions. The working group’s latest whitepaper, spearheaded by ZeroNorth, calls for a new data standard to be created to evolve vessel reports with standard and validated inputs. What makes this working group unique is not just the wide buy-in and participation from key market leaders, including competitors, but that it is focusing on tangible action that can be solved with focused effort. 

At the same time, in another nod to the importance of industry wide collaboration, we are proud to show our support for accelerated decarbonisation in shipping by joining the Global Maritime Forum’s Getting to Zero Coalition.

What the future holds

ZeroNorth is driven by our vision to make global trade green and we are laser focused on creating a single destination for voyage, vessel, and bunker optimisation. Challenging traditional mindsets and data silos, ZeroNorth is leading the way via multilateral collaboration to make immediate progress on decarbonisation for the benefit of both profit and planet.

Looking forward, it will be crucial for ZeroNorth to not only sustain but increase our momentum. With the confidence and trust of several existing and new key stakeholders, we recently raised over $50 million in investment during our Series B funding round to continue with our growth ambitions and lead widespread change in our industry.

Thank you for celebrating this special 2-year milestone with us. We are excited for what lies ahead, and we welcome you to continue being part of our company’s journey in the future.