Motion Ventures

One month ago, Zhiyue(Cici) published a 35-page thesis on why maritime cybersecurity finally became investable. The argument centred on a structural gap: existing detection tools - IT monitoring, OT monitoring, GNSS integrity - are all cloud-dependent and siloed. None of them built for the moment all three are confidently reading the wrong thing. The evidence has been piling up. → April 2024. 117 cargo vessels simultaneously appeared at Beirut Airport on ECDIS. None were there. The signals had been spoofed. → May 2025. MSC Antonia, 7,000 TEUs, Red Sea. GPS spoofing confirmed. The chart showed a valid position. The ship was not there. It grounded near Jeddah. → June 2025. Front Eagle, VLCC, 2 million barrels of crude. Tracking data placed it onshore in Iran two days before it collided with a tanker near the Strait of Hormuz. Fire. Full crew evacuation. 970 ships per day experiencing GPS interference in that same 10-day window. The winning architecture, Cici hypothesise, is edge-native, hardware-anchored, and offline-capable - detection that keeps working when the signals themselves can't be trusted and shore can't see in. Cequra, Inc is that company. Andrew W. Sallay and the team are building the decision layer that sits above IT, OT, and GNSS - cross-referencing all three at the edge, in real time. We backed them. Full story in the comments.

We asked founders and maritime executives at our reception to fund or pass on startup ideas. Some highlights: "Too crowded." "I don't think it's a product - I think it's a feature." "That would be an angel check." "I've experienced that first hand. It's a pain." "A happy crew means a happy ship - I'd fund that." Thanks to Nakul Malhotra, Punit Oza, Leo Grayson, Tony Hildrew and Joshua O'Hanlon for not holding back.

Tilla completed full fleet rollout with Stolt-Nielsen Tankers - 100+ chemical parcel tankers, two pilots, then the entire fleet. Stolt is one of 20+ corporate partners in our consortium. When we backed Tilla, that consortium was part of the deal. Operators sign because the product works on their vessels. What the consortium does is make sure the right operators know our portfolio companies exist at the right time - so pilots happen, technology gets evaluated on its merits, and founders get a fair shot at conversion. Tilla took the shot. Pilot to full fleet at this scale is rare in maritime. Congratulations to the Tilla team.

Building Maritime. Issue 02. April was a month of things shipping - hardware into the water, AI into the platform, and behavioural science into some of the world’s largest fleets. April edition: → bound4blue installs the first eSAILs manufactured in China on a Klaveness vessel → Moddule ships four AI tools natively into its platform, at no added cost → Signol launches a fleet-wide trial with NYK Line on crew-led decarbonisation → Sinay acquires MariTrace to bring vessel tracking into its core platform → Tilla rolls out across Stolt Tankers’ entire fleet of 100+ chemical parcel tankers From the fund: we hosted our annual reception at Singapore Maritime Week, launched Motion Intelligence, and published our full investment thesis for the first time in five years - making the case that maritime is 3× underinvested relative to GDP. Feedback from Issue 01 was appreciated - keep it coming. Subscribe to Building Maritime for a monthly read on what’s moving across maritime tech.

The thing that surprised me most at our annual reception was how many of the founders in the room are still building in stealth. Maritime is supposed to be the industry nobody's building in. Tuesday night I counted at least a dozen founders - some I knew, more I didn't - working on companies that haven't been announced yet. They were there because the rest of the people in the room are the ones they'll need when they come out. If you're a founder building in stealth in maritime and we haven't met - my inbox is open.

Five years ago, this combination of people would not have been in the same room. In the room at Building the Future of Maritime 2026: → Shipping families who have moved cargo for generations. → Sovereign funds. → Family offices that have never owned a vessel in their lives. → Classification societies. → Governments. → Deep-tech founders who didn't start their careers in maritime and now can't look away from it. Maritime is being rebuilt. The decade ahead is about building the thing that comes next and doing it fast enough to matter. To Building the Future of Maritime.

Seven chapters. From why maritime is the last uninvested industry to the five-stage operating system we believe is being built - and where venture capital fits. Our full investment thesis is now public.