How do you use Artificial Intelligence (AI) to ensure and increase safety on the sea? Singapore-based maritime tech startup Nautisense may have the answer.

With its platform MantaMind, Nautisense aims to enhance maritime safety, efficiency, and sustainability by providing AI solutions that improve predictive maintenance and critical decision-making processes.

Launched in 2023, the company wants to ensure that seafarers and maritime operators have access to the best tools for navigating the challenges of modern sea travel. According to Dr Vinayak Prabhu, Co-Founder and CEO of Nautisense, in an email interview with e27, one application of MantaMind includes helping marine superintendents perform internal audits of ships.

“Typically, a marine superintendent takes approximately 24 person-hours to perform the audit, including the preparation time, approximately seven to eight hours on the ship itself and the time taken to write the report and enter it into the ship management system,” he says.

But MantaMind updates this process by optimising and prioritising the aspects of the audit that the superintendent should focus on; this could be based on the previous audits’ reports and the crew’s performance. It also has a smart referencing tool to help the superintendent with any questions related to any aspect of the audit by referencing various codes and regulations, internal operating procedures, and past audit results.

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Finally, it automates the process of generating the report and connecting it to the organisation’s ship management system.

“Nautisense is the only company today to provide a seamless combination of automation of mundane digital tasks that frees up the time, of say, a chief engineer, for more critical and situational decision making, and supports this decision making by providing holistic and deterministic recommendations,” says Dr Prabhu.

“In view of this, MantaMind has been built to make task automation reliable and the decision recommendations deterministic. With a focus on privacy and security through ring-fenced enterprise data sets, MantaMind provides highly contextual and accurate recommendations verified by domain experts from the maritime industry. And by the way, our AI solution does this with or without strong connectivity.”

According to Dr Prabhu, two aspects play a key role in ensuring the quality of insights: the tech platform and the domain expert validation.

“The tech behind MantaMind has been designed to continuously push the limit of how deterministic an AI companion can be, hence providing reliable and actionable insights,” he says.

“A bulk of our efforts have also been to work with domain experts from our customers, the actual users of the platform, to validate the recommendations and therefore continually improve the platform’s performance.”

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In developing its AI solutions, Nautisense deals with two main challenges: The first is to ensure the quality of the platform’s insights and its mitigation and focus area. “Delivering such quality output is not a given in the AI sector, and our team has dedicated a significant portion of our development efforts to ensure we can do so.”

The second one is tackling the unique data challenge in the maritime industry. “The maritime value chain is complex and teams typically manage their data sets fairly differently across different geographies. As you can imagine, this results in varied standards and more often than not, unorganised and unstructured datasets that are,” explains Dr Prabhu.

“We have made a strong push to integrate a variety of data inputs into the MantaMind platform so that no matter the format, we can make sense of it right away. This means right from text documents to images, to flat files such as Excels and CSVs, we can utilise all these data sources collectively to provide holistic and well-thought-out recommendations that maritime professionals can action on.”

Sailing to the future with AI

Nautisense is led by co-founders Dr Vinayak Prabhu, Gaurav Gupte, and Jheeva Subramanian. It has a team of four other members with expertise in tech and solution development, as well as customer and innovation management.

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For its initial growth over 2024 and 2025, Nautisense is focusing on customers in Southeast Asia, Scandinavia, and the UK.

“Our customers can range from ship owners, to ship managers and to maritime products and services companies. The intended users of Nautisense’s MantaMind AI agent are maritime professionals, including vessel operators and managers, both on-board ships and on-shore offices,” Dr Prabhu explains.

“Our go-to-market strategy includes delivering apps through maritime marketplaces with established traction, such as the Azure and the Veracity marketplace, which we are getting onboarded onto. We are also in talks with connectivity providers that cater to maritime businesses on-shore and at sea to bundle MantaMind’s intelligence suite alongside the services they already provide.”

According to him, the year 2024 is a pivotal one for the company.

“Our main objectives for this year have been to debut with a strong market entry and build up a portfolio of MantaMind early adopters with a positive product and user experience,” he closes.

“2024 is also the year where we intend to raise a seed round of funds to grow the team with the best talent possible, and to fuel our expansion into the UK and Scandinavian market.”

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Image Credit: Nautisense

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