For this Company Spotlight, we interviewed Voyager Portal’s Co-Founder and CEO (Matthew Costello) about how they are addressing the vast inefficiencies and lack of data-driven decision-making in the maritime shipping industry. Voyager Portal is a SaaS platform helping companies reduce risk, cost, and complexity across their marine supply chain. For more information on Voyager Portal, please visit voyagerportal.com.

Background: Voyager Portal co-founders, Matthew Costello and Bret Smart, first met while they were both working in the maritime shipping industry for Stolt-Nielsen in 2011. During their time there, they both observed how archaic and manual processes were. For example, emails were being regularly composed in the same format as a telex and paper documents were still the standard (some were even being delivered by sending an employee via airplane).

In 2017 as a business school project, Matthew started to put together the initial idea of a software platform to solve the inefficiencies of the maritime shipping industry and reached out to Bret to see if he would be interested in working with him in the research project. After months of interviews with potential customers and further refining the business model, Matthew and Bret co-founded Voyager Portal in 2018. Today, Voyager Portal has over 90 companies utilizing its offering to manage over a billion dollars of freight per year.

Value Proposition: Voyager Portal’s foundational operational layer provides the maritime shipping industry with a unique “single source of truth” that enables customers to realize the following benefits:

Ease of Coordination: Every shipment or “voyage” involves 10 to 15 different parties on average and generates over 50,000 data points, most of which are communicated via emails and spreadsheets. This very manual process is inherently unproductive. It also leads to frequent miscommunication that can result in production delays, demurrage, and financial penalties for the cargo owner. Voyager Portal enables each of these parties (i.e., suppliers, receivers, ship owners, customs, brokers, terminals, agents, etc.) to easily access and share information on the same platform, which has led to huge productivity gains and cost savings.
Complete & Accurate Datasets: Voyager Portal has streamlined maritime shipping workflows into structured forms, fields, and updates that require that all relevant data is inputted and accurate before a voyage can move on to the next step in the process. This ensures that the quality of the data is not questioned and all information (i.e., costs) is captured.
Visibility & Insights: By providing “self-serve” access to data to all stakeholders of a voyage, Voyager Portal’s customers have full visibility across their entire operations and no longer must call or email another party for ETAs or other information. Furthermore, the platform’s exception-based reporting immediately alerts the appropriate team members of potential issues that could cause unnecessary delays and costs.
Low-Code Workflow Customization: Different cargo types require different workflows, as they have varied handling and regulatory requirements. To make the user experience as seamless and flexible as possible, Voyager Portal employs low-code workflow configuration tools that enable any party of the voyage to adapt any of its unique workflows to the platform in seconds using drag and drop data fields. Further, as processes evolve, workflows can be easily adjusted.

Closing Thoughts: The recent pandemic made the public realize that the maritime shipping industry (~$400 billion market annually) was wrought with inefficient processes and needs to embrace technologies like Voyager Portal to streamline operations and drive out unnecessary delays and costs. We look forward to following Matthew, Bret and their team, as Voyager Portal continues to enable all parties involved in these voyages to leverage data and insights to make better decisions.

Company Spotlights

August 2022