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.