Damen Shipyards Group has become a corporate partner of the PortXL accelerator program for the maritime industry… Once again. In 2015 Damen was one of the first companies to support the start-up support program in its early days.

“We will be participating again from this year on,” explains Tom Akkerman of Damen. “We want to boost the transition of the maritime sector. In addition to our Research, Development & Innovation trajectories and our own Corporate Venturing programme, in which we work together with start-ups and scale-ups, collaboration within PortXL is an excellent opportunity to create acceleration in the field of sustainability and digitalisation.”

Novel solutions

Tara Koole, Program Manager at PortXL fully agrees. “At PortXL we welcome Damen and look forward to working together towards our common mission. Our corporate partners are at the forefront of maritime innovation. Their desire to innovate and collaborate with novel solutions is what fuels PortXL.”

The industry has major challenges ahead of it, the main two being energy transition and digitalisation. The search for reducing emissions to (almost) zero is an endeavor that will shape shipping in the next decades. The digitalisation of operations is a precondition for this but is also a particularly important driver to improve the quality and efficiency of work overall.