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Flagship Founders’ latest startup spin off Arinto provides ‘arrival optimisation’ technology for more efficient sea voyages


  • Venture studio Flagship Founders is launching Arinto, a new startup with a sustainability focus within the shipping industry.
  • ●  With Arinto’s software, the arrival time of ships can be calculated and planned so that they arrive at the port at the best possible time and waiting times are minimised.
  • ●  In this way, the cruising speed can be optimised, thereby significantly reducing fuel consumption and the associated costs and emissions.

    Berlin, 1 June 2023 – The Berlin-based venture studio Flagship Founders has announced today the spin-off of another startup, Arinto, a software solution enabling ‘Just-In-Time Arrival’ of merchant ships in ports. With this, shipping companies and ship managers will be able to calculate the ideal arrival time of vessels and therefore make voyages much more efficient. This will lead to drastic reductions in fuel consumption, lower emissions, and make shipping more sustainable.

    Global shipping causes about three percent of worldwide CO2 emissions. A variety of factors contribute to this. One of the biggest and yet most unnecessary inefficiencies is the fact that ships’ arrival times at ports are not optimally planned. On average, 5-10 percent of a vessel’s active time is spent waiting before ports, with the vessel often having sailed at high speed on the way there (the ‘hurry-and-wait principle’). This results in unnecessarily high fuel consumption. The result: worldwide, 100 million tonnes of CO2 (equivalent to a good 15% of Germany’s total CO2 emissions in 2022, or the average CO2 emissions of about 22 million petrol-driven cars in one year) and 18 billion US dollars could be saved annually if the speed of ships were planned in such a way that they could enter the port at the appropriate time and without waiting.

    Arinto wants to solve this problem: Based on real-time data analysis and machine learning technologies, the startup is currently developing software that will enable ‘Just-In-Time Arrival’, i.e. the precise arrival of ships at the port.

    The solution accesses various commercial data sources as well as data from “Automatic Identification Systems” (AIS) and analyses relevant data points with the help of machine learning algorithms. In this way, it provides important information, for example on the congestion of the port in question, the shipping traffic in front of it and the current waiting times, and on this basis makes recommendations on the optimal arrival time at the port. The software does not optimise the route itself, but rather the arrival time of the ship and therefore differentiates itself from existing voyage optimisation tools.

Large market potential worldwide

“The potential market for Arinto is large, and almost untapped at that,” explains Isabel Sum, founder and managing director of Arinto. “Emissions reduction is the number one issue in shipping. The pressure from politics and legislation is extremely high. In the long term, no company will be able to afford the kind of inefficiencies we see everywhere now. This in-turn leads to a strong increase in demand pressure from the shipping companies. Everyone is looking for solutions and we offer them.”

Fabian Feldhaus, co-founder and managing director of Flagship Founders, comments on the new venture: “Our claim is to only develop business models that solve pressing problems in the market. Our other startups Kaiko Systems, Tilla Technologies and zero44 have shown that we live up to this. Our pre-foundation validation phase clearly showed the great potential in the market for Arinto. With Isabel Sum, we have also found the perfect founder and managing director. I am sure Arinto will quickly prove its relevance and value to the industry.”

Arinto is currently in the product development phase. In the next few months, the team is to be built up, and talks with potential partners and customers are also the focus for Isabel Sum and her company. The launch of the software for the broad market is planned for later this year.

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