MarineIT / Company / About
Who is building this
Built by people who have run the desk.
The pairing
Two people who between them had seen the whole problem.
Software for a commercial desk fails in one of two ways. Either it is built by people who understand technology and not the trade, and every specific thing ends up in a configuration screen. Or it is built by people who understand the trade and not software, and it becomes an expensive spreadsheet with a login.
Ten years at sea.
Mariner · Commercial side
A decade sailing before coming ashore. Which means the terms on this site are not vocabulary learned for a product brief — they are things he has been on the receiving end of.
When a recap says the laytime is SHINC and the weather says otherwise, he has been the person aboard while that argument happened. When a circular quotes a draft the vessel cannot actually make, he knows what that costs at the load port rather than in theory.
He has been the ship at the other end of the recap. That is a different kind of knowing.
A career building ERP.
Engineer · Platform side
Enterprise platforms are what he builds and has built for a living — the systems a business actually runs on, rather than tools bolted to the side of one.
Which also means he knows exactly how they fail. Data models that generalise until they describe nothing. Integrations that break quietly. Configuration screens where the vendor put everything it decided not to understand. Every one of those is a decision someone made, and every one of them was avoidable.
Anyone can build features. Knowing what makes an ERP rot is the harder education.
The result is a system that models the trade rather than parameterising it — SHINC and SHEX, MOLOO and MOLCHOPT, stowage factors and draft marks, built in rather than typed in.
What we are good at
Three capabilities, and they only work together.
Any one of these on its own produces a familiar kind of failure. It is the combination that is unusual.
Operators who know the trade
People who have worked the business rather than studied it. It shows in what the product refuses to do as much as in what it does — the checks that run whether you ask for them or not, and the places where it declines to guess.
Technology built into the process
Not software the desk has to work around. The eight stages exist because that is how a voyage actually moves; the record is one record because a fixture and its correspondence were never two things. The technology is shaped to the process, not the other way round.
Global business builders
A globally distributed team, used to standing something up across markets, time zones and regulatory positions. Shipping is not a domestic business and neither is building for it — the desk in Singapore and the desk in Piraeus want the same system to behave differently.
How we work
Technology built into the business process, not beside it.
Most commercial software asks the desk to change shape. Enter this here, file it there, remember to update the other system by Friday. It is a tax the desk pays for the software's convenience, and it is why so much of it ends up abandoned next to a spreadsheet that does the job better.
We start from the opposite end. The circular arrives the way circulars arrive. The negotiation runs the way negotiations run. The system reads what lands and organises itself around it, so nobody has to feed it.
If the desk has to work around it, we built it wrong.
What that means in practice
Nothing is re-keyed. The parsed circular and the voyage record are the same rows. There is no step where a person carries information between two systems.
It runs alongside on day one. Nobody stops using Outlook, no correspondence is migrated, and a desk that ignores it entirely loses nothing.
Every figure opens. Any number traces to its inputs and their sources, because a figure a desk cannot check is a figure it will quietly redo in a spreadsheet.
Judgement stays with the person. The system prepares work and routes it. It never sends an offer, accepts a counter or commits you to anything.
Commitments
Six commitments you can hold us to.
Not values. Things you can check, and complain about if we fail them.
One trade at a time
Dry bulk is finished before anything else starts. Tanker intelligence is the next build — a separate one, not a widening of this. Breadth would quietly destroy the depth that is the whole point.
Every figure is auditable
Any number the system produces shows its source and its workings. If we cannot explain where a figure came from, it does not go on a screen.
Your data is yours
Your circulars, fixtures and rates are never used to train anything, never aggregated into market products, and leave with you if you leave. We will put that in the contract.
Built with desks, not for them
Every capability on this site started as a complaint from someone who charters, operates or settles for a living. We would rather ship one thing a broker asked for than five we imagined.
We say when we are wrong for you
If your book includes tankers today, if you need technical management now, or if your current system works and nobody complains — we say so in the first meeting rather than the fourth.
Agents stop at drafting
An agent prepares a reply, an estimate or a claim. It does not send, offer, counter or commit. That boundary is permanent, not a limitation waiting to be removed.
The data commitments in full. How the AI works →
Where this goes
The commercial chain first. Then more of it.
Dry bulk commercial runs today — eight stages, four desks, one record. Tanker intelligence is next, built separately rather than generalised from this. Technical management follows.
We publish the order and not the dates, because a date we miss is worth less to you than an order we keep.
What we do not build
Technical management. Planned maintenance, class and survey scheduling, defect management. Third in the sequence; until then, the fleet-management vendors do it properly.
Crewing and payroll. Not ours, and not adjacent to anything we do well today.
Statutory accounting. We do commercial finance. Your ledger and your statutory reporting stay where they are.
Other trades, for now. Tankers, gas, chemicals, containers. Covered well by others, and covering them today would cost us the depth that is the point of this.
Talk to us
The easiest way to judge us is to make us work.
Bring a circular from this morning, or a voyage that went wrong. Forty-five minutes, your data, and an honest answer about whether we are any use to you.
Or write first — sales@marineit.ai