A billion-dollar deal on a spreadsheet
In maritime shipping, a single sale-and-purchase transaction can move hundreds of millions of dollars. Yet for decades the due-diligence process has run on emailed PDFs, shared folders, and spreadsheets patched together with institutional knowledge. Documents arrive out of order. Certificates expire unnoticed mid-deal. Flag-state requirements differ between buyer and seller jurisdictions. And somewhere in that maze, deals stall — or close with hidden liabilities baked in.
Our founding team lived this first-hand. Sotiri Dushas spent over two decades executing newbuild programs worth more than $1.5 billion and S&P transactions across multiple cycles. The bottleneck was never capital or will — it was information chaos.
The gap no generic tool was filling
Generic virtual data rooms were designed for M&A lawyers exchanging contracts between corporations. They do not know that a Class Certificate has a renewal window. They cannot flag that the ISM Document of Compliance belongs to the manager, not the owner. They have no concept of IMO numbers, flag-state requirements, or MARPOL annexes.
We looked at what existed — folders in the cloud, generic VDRs bolted onto shipping workflows, Excel trackers passed between broker and owner — and we saw the same gap every time: the tool did not understand the asset.
Built from the inside out
Marintel.co was built by maritime insiders, not fintech generalists retrofitting a template. Every feature starts from a real transaction problem:
- AI document classification that understands the difference between a Continuous Synopsis Record and a Safety Management Certificate — so nothing gets buried in the wrong folder. See how our AI works →
- Vessel-aware data rooms that tie every document to the ship it belongs to, track certificate expiry, and surface conflicts before they surface in the negotiation. Explore Data Rooms →
- Tamper-evident audit chains so every party at the table can see exactly who reviewed what and when — and that record cannot be quietly edited afterward.
- Sanctions screening baked in, not bolted on — because counterparty risk is discovered at the worst possible moment when it is discovered late.
Why now?
The convergence of large language models capable of reading unstructured legal and technical documents, cloud infrastructure affordable enough for individual brokers, and a shipping industry finally open to digital transformation created a window that did not exist five years ago. We moved through it.
Marintel.co exists because maritime professionals deserve a tool that speaks their language — one that turns the document chaos of a deal into a structured, searchable, auditable record that closes faster and with fewer surprises.