• Secro

  Participated · Series A · May 2025

  Secro provides a modular, blockchain-based SaaS platform that tokenizes mission-critical trade finance documents and automates workflows for corporates, financial institutions, and logistics providers across commodities supply chains. The platform is purpose-built for sectors such as agri-food, fertilizers, oil & energy, metals, and forestry, replacing paper-based processes to enable faster execution, lower capital costs, and reduced fraud risk. Secro delivers tailored digital instruments and API-driven integrations for lenders, insurers, and technology partners. The company plans to use its new funding to accelerate integrations with insurance carriers, lenders, and technology platforms, enhance global API interoperability, and advance its AI capabilities for risk assessment and fraud detection. Headquartered in Charleston, South Carolina, Secro runs technology operations in Europe and maintains an EMEA hub in Geneva. Secro provides a new-generation electronic bill of lading solution aimed at digitizing the global trade of commodities. The company is positioning its platform to deliver value and innovation to customers across global maritime trade. Secro announced the addition of three institutional investors—Innoport, Motion Ventures, and Whysol Investments—alongside continuing support from long-standing backers Augment Ventures and TMV. Innoport is identified as the Schulte Group’s maritime corporate venture capital arm; Motion Ventures is described as a maritime investment cluster based in Singapore; Whysol is noted as Secro’s first institutional investor from Italy. The company says the new strategic investors bring fresh synergies and an expanded network. Secro’s team, including Michele Sancricca, is described as laying the foundation to transform e-bill processes, with the company signalling more developments in 2024. Secro offers Secro e-Bill, a digital bill-of-lading platform that performs the functions of a paper bill of lading with increased speed, user interaction, lower cost, and security. The platform is built on the NEM Symbol private blockchain and enables users to export proof of original documents, attach supporting files, and convert e-bills into paper to meet compliance and local customs requirements. Secro allows users to share electronic bills of lading with partners, enabling multiple teams to collaborate on eBL drafts and invite internal and external employees. The company says it does not require the private agreements used by other electronic bill of lading providers. Secro raised $3.6M in Seed funding and intends to use the proceeds to officially scale its platform, develop new features, and expand its network of business partners. The company is led by Michele Sancricca and is based in Wilmington, DE.

• Hefring Marine

  Participated · Equity · May 2024

  Hefring Marine builds a hardware-enabled Software-as-a-Service platform that uses Machine Learning and IoT to give vessel operators decision-making support and monitoring insights for safety, fuel efficiency, and maintenance planning. The company serves multiple maritime segments including search and rescue, defence, crew transfer, fishing, piloting, and tourism and leisure. Its team combines software, mechanical and electrical engineering, condition and vibration monitoring, Machine Learning and AI, plus boat building, business development and product teams. Hefring positions itself to enable an intelligent future fleet capable of safer, more efficient, and more autonomous operations. The startup plans geographic expansion, including opening an office in Portugal, funded in part by a recent investment. The new funding will also support expansion into other markets and further development of its IMAS System.

• ANNEA

  Participated · Seed · Dec 2023

  Annea offers a digital twin platform that enables automated predictive maintenance and performance optimization for renewable energy assets. Its technology combines renewable-energy industry knowledge with engineering, machine learning, and reliability modeling focused on predictive maintenance. The company is led by CEO Maik Reder and COO Marcel Frenzel. Founded in 2019 and based in Hamburg and Lisbon, Annea is active across Europe, North America, and Southeast Asia. It plans to use recent funding to strengthen its U.S. foothold, expand its established position across Europe (including Germany, Spain, Portugal, and the U.K.), and grow in Southeast Asia. ANNEA, founded in 2019 and operating from Hamburg and Lisbon, offers an all‑in‑one platform to reduce O&M costs for wind and solar assets. The platform creates digital twins from existing sensor data and combines machine learning with physics‑based modelling to predict malfunctions up to 12 months ahead. ANNEA reports it can derive remaining useful lifetime at the component level with 99.9% accuracy and can ingest drone images into an image recognition module for automated structural‑damage analysis. The system produces actionable maintenance and repair recommendations via an intuitive user interface to improve reliability and cost‑effectiveness. The company has secured €1 million of fresh funding co‑led by Faber and Innopart. ANNEA plans to use the capital to expand its team, scale the platform to global industry players, and aims to become the leading international predictive maintenance company in the renewable energy sector by 2025.

• zero44

  Participated · Equity · May 2023

  zero44 offers a SaaS platform that helps shipping companies, ship managers and charterers plan and optimize CO2 emissions, providing a comprehensive, daily-updated overview of emissions, required EU certificates and related cash flow. The platform allows users to purchase certificates and transfer them to contractual partners. Founded in 2022 by CEOs Friederike Hesse and Nils Obermann, the company has secured customers and partners in its first year, including MPC Container Ships as a development partner and MariApps Marine Solutions as a distribution partner. zero44 intends to use its latest funding to further develop its software, acquire new customers and expand the team. The company is based in Berlin, Germany and focuses on merchant-ship CO2 compliance and optimization.

• Harbor Lab

  Participated · Seed · Dec 2022

  Harbor Lab builds a platform to streamline port-call disbursements and port-call expenses, replacing spreadsheet-driven workflows across ports. The company says its product can reduce invoicing errors and overpayments from roughly 20% to about 3% per port call. Port-call costs are a major line item for vessels—about $2.2M per vessel per year—and the global cost from port calls exceeds $220 billion annually, which frames Harbor Lab's market opportunity. Founder Antonis Malaxianakis was an early user who manually reviewed over 20,000 disbursement accounts, and the team focused engineering resources against a strict roadmap after seed funding. Harbor Lab already counts Great Eastern Shipping, Oldendorff, Veson Nautical, and 90POE among its clients and partners. The company is emphasizing stronger KYC on counterparties (it sanctioned about 100 participants overnight amid geopolitical events) and sees new environmental rules and geopolitical crises increasing urgency for its product. Harbor Lab, launched in March 2020 in Athens, Greece, provides a SaaS disbursement-account analysis platform for the maritime industry. Its software collects official port tariffs from port authorities and uses an internally developed algorithm to calculate and evaluate port expenses in real time. The platform claims to reduce port call expenses by approximately 6% per port call and to cut administration costs by up to 75%. Harbor Lab secured €6.1 million in funding to further develop the product. The company operates in the estimated $200 billion annual maritime disbursements market. Management has said it plans global expansion into major maritime hubs such as Copenhagen and Singapore and to develop the product further with machine learning capabilities.

No current team members are available.