A platform for the maritime industry has raised £1.2 million in a pre-Series A funding round.
Two million seafarers and up to 50 million remote workers in various ocean industries face day-to-day collaboration barriers, leading to poor crew productivity, engagement and welfare.
FrontM aims to solve the connectivity and efficiency challenges that maritime businesses and their mobile workforces or customers face when operating in remote and low bandwidth environments.
The maritime ‘super-app’ platform and app marketplace is optimised for low bandwidth environments, with an array of partner integrations and app rollouts in the pipeline.
It operates a multi-sided business model that connects ships and crews with maritime services and solutions providers, using edge computing and AI technology to maximise the value of available bandwidth of existing satellite connections.
Its low-code developer framework enables the likes of telehealth, video conferencing, remote assistance and tracking and monitoring for ships, enhancing connectivity between ship-shore teams.
The round was led by Jenson Funding Partners, Tradeworks.vc, Motion Ventures and a syndicate of MarTech investors.
“Since our COVID-pivot, we evolved our maritime-focused product roadmap and completed a range of initial rollouts,” said Kiran Venkatesh, co-founder and CEO.
“I’m hugely excited to have the backing of eminent maritime investors who share our vision and are equally passionate about digitally empowering people.”
Jeffrey Faustin, partner and CIO of Jenson Funding Partners, UK, added: “FrontM team’s vision and conviction stood out from our first meeting, and their execution has matched that.
“Their understanding of the communications and efficiency challenges within the maritime industry and the solution that they’ve built to remedy that is exceptional. The industry is vital to global transport and productivity – and businesses have been in need of a platform that solves these problems.
“We’ve supported FrontM from pre-Covid seed stages and are very happy to continue to do so.”