Deepsea: bigger data, smaller emissions

In April 2019, about a year into their first entrepreneurial venture, Roberto Coustas and Konstantinos Kyriakopoulos were pitching their idea to a potential big client in Geneva. “They saw something in us,” Roberto recalls, “They said we looked like the kind of guys who could make what they say possible. I guess it just clicked… So they asked us ‘ok, will you do it?’ and we started explaining our plans and expectations. They cut us off: ‘no, will you do it now?’ At that point, there’s only one thing you can say...”

At the time, Roberto and Konstantinos were recent university graduates with a passion for artificial intelligence. They had just set up a company, Deepsea, to bring together big data, artificial intelligence and the shipping industry in order to improve performance and achieve efficiencies and savings.

Deepsea’s cutting-edge technology collects data on the ship relating to its performance, which is then analysed and used to improve performance: “We install our hardware on the ships, hook it up and collect massive amounts of data - more than 400 metrics per minute. This data gets sent to the cloud and then our software will manage it, helping the user to make sense of it and extract value. Then we will filter it with AI to get insights into what the data depicts. For example, we can detect sub-optimal performance and pinpoint shortfalls in a ship’s machinery before it causes a major problem.”

But the main impact is in route optimisation, by marrying the vessel’s characteristics and performance to weather forecasts. The outcome is a 5-8% reduction in fuel costs and CO2 emissions, making shipping leaner, greener and cleaner. “We can offer huge accuracy on fuel consumption, taking into account dynamic changes to the environment around a vessel, and based on data specific to the vessel at a specific moment in time. Better maintenance can also play an important role, as can dealing with fouling effectively. Savings can climb to 20%,” he adds.

Back at the beginning, the company had just one client and three employees. By mid-2020, they had grown to 50 employees, working with more than 100 vessels, with the aim of reaching 300 by the end of the year. Part of this impressive growth came as a result of an equity investment from Environmental Technology Fund (ETF) Partners, a venture capital firm focusing on sustainability through innovation, backed by the EIF under the EU’s Investment Plan for Europe. Looking back, Roberto underlines the value of hard work: “You’ve just got to keep your head down, do your best and suddenly something happens. But you need to do your best all the time.”

Company: deepsea (Greece)

Type of business: environment; transport; ICT

Financial intermediary: ETF Partners

EIF financing: RCR mandate and own resources, EFSI sub-window 1

For further information about EIF intermediaries in Greece, please refer to: http://www.eif.org/what_we_do/where/el/index.htm