Starboard Maritime Intelligence has successfully closed a NZ$5 million seed funding round. Starboard’s focus is on tackling illegal fishing, transnational crime, preventing biosecurity outbreaks, and protecting at-sea assets via its Software as a Service (SaaS) maritime domain awareness platform. This has been developed alongside government and intergovernmental users in New Zealand, Australia, and the Pacific.
SaaS is a key growth sector for New Zealand’s economy – as a weightless export, this provides significant opportunities for international scaling and SaaS is set to become a major industry in New Zealand.
Starboard’s seed funding includes New Zealand-based investors Altered Capital (lead), Icehouse Ventures, Invest South, Soul Capital, and Whakatupu Aotearoa Foundation, as well as US-based SeaAhead.
The investment enables Starboard to strengthen its support for a growing number of analysts in the Pacific region. Alongside this the team is expanding its go-to-market function.
‘Starboard enables days of analysis to be completed within minutes. Analysts gain more valuable information, more quickly leading to better decisions about which vessels to focus on. We are working to take Starboard to analysts globally, to help them collaborate and share insights for the protection of our oceans,’ said Starboard CEO Trent Fulcher, commenting that the blue economy is growing rapidly and is estimated to reach over NZ$5 trillion by 2030.
As use of the oceans intensifies for economic development there has been a global rise in maritime security threats, environmental damage, and regulatory pressures.
‘The global maritime surveillance market, that Starboard operates in, is predicted to reach NZ$67 billion USD by 2030 and we are seeing a growing need for greater operational efficiency and collaboration,’ said Craig Mawdsley, Partner at Altered Capital.
New Zealand’s Ministry of Business, Innovation, and Employment (MBIE) estimates that by 2030 the SaaS industry could be worth NZ$14 billion NZD and employ nearly 60,000.
