With the help of sensors mounted on customer ships, Halifax’s OceanSync is commercializing a potential solution to a longstanding challenge for the marine industry: that of obtaining reliable weather data.

Chief executive Sebastiaan Ambtman, who founded the company in 2020 with energy sector entrepreneur Jarret Stuart, arrived in Halifax from Amsterdam by sailboat. During the passage, he recalls being surprised by the lack of up-to-date weather information available. Deeper investigations once he reached Nova Scotia revealed the problem affected not just private mariners like himself, but also large companies.

“There’s a huge lack of data out over the open ocean, and the reason for this is that it’s really challenging to build an observation network,” he said in an interview. “There’s no fixed structures that you can attach a weather station to, so you have to rely on either satellites or buoys.

“When we were looking at the problem, we saw there are like 200,000 commercial vessels, maybe hundreds of thousands into the millions if you take small crafts and fishing boats into account. So this, in itself, is a great network if we connect all these ships to the cloud.”

The OceanSync sensor suite gathers meteorological data like wind speed and barometric pressure, which an edge computing device then pre-processes before uploading it to the cloud every 10 minutes via satellite internet, usually provided by aerospace unicorn Starlink.

An earlier iteration of the OceanSync concept involved using only vessels’ existing sensors, but Ambtman and Stuart rejected that option because of the inconsistent quality of many ships’ equipment. Instead, OceanSync outsources the sensors, builds the edge computing units in-house and sells the package to customers as a subscription.

Twenty-five ships are now equipped with OceanSync sensors, with installations pending on another five. The system has been deployed on ships in Norway, the Netherlands, Germany, Monaco and Canada, with the fleet in Germany including 16 vessels. Ambtman and Stuart’s business development efforts have so far focused heavily on the North Atlantic because of the region’s heavily trafficked shipping lanes and extreme weather.

The information uploaded to the cloud every 10 minutes also includes a ship’s GPS location, which has proven popular with large fleet operators that have historically struggled to gain real-time insights into their vessels’ movements. And the detailed nature of the data gathered means it can help resolve insurance claims.

“We had an incident with one of the vessels in the Pacific,” Ambtman said. “They were routed into a typhoon — waves over 10 metres. It was a bulk carrier (freighter), quite a large bulk carrier, and they lost solar panels, which they had mounted on the decks.

“With our data, we could see at a very high resolution how events unfolded and they took that into account with the insurance claim.”

OceanSync now has 12 employees, including mechanical and electrical engineers, a naval architect and a master mariner. The company is also looking to hire two business development staff in Europe and one person in North America to deal specifically with government contracts.

In April, 2022 the company raised a $1.7 million pre-seed round from three venture capital funds in the United States, with a seed round currently ongoing.