Greywing

Greywing is a Singapore-based maritime software company that builds decision-support and data-integration tools for ship operators, crew managers, commercial and technical teams. The platform draws data from private and public sources and converts it into navigable reports, replacing workflows previously spread across email, rudimentary vessel tracking systems, HR ERP systems, phone calls and spreadsheets. Its stated aim is to move the industry from information reporting toward real-time decision-making and predictive alerts.

The product line has evolved over time. Y Combinator's profile describes four products: Flotilla, a fleet monitoring tool for identifying fleet-level patterns, optimisations and risk or liability vectors; CRY4, an operational tool for individual vessels that gathers intelligence on current or proposed routes to help select the safest and cheapest ports of call; Landfall, a crew management and analysis system providing risk reporting and crew editing; and Semaphore, a port-agent communications tool for planning port calls. Later products include Crew Change (COVID-19 testing, quarantine and regulation management), a crew-change carbon emissions estimator, SeaGPT (an AI chatbot for port communication), and an AI-based Crew Matrix Planning tool.

The current website centres on Proteus, described as a conversational assistant for maritime data covering technical manuals, crewing records and missing documents, real-time flight options from travel agents, crew visa and travel-requirement verification, and chartering data including VMS, prefixture and market data. Additional stated capabilities include voyage timeline and bunker-consumption/deviation-cost prediction, real-time vessel tracking via satellite AIS or a customer's voyage system, activity audit trails, permissioning, exports to Microsoft formats and Power BI, multilingual and voice access in over 40 languages, and a public port intelligence directory covering more than 100,000 ports with data on port restrictions, flight restrictions, airport access, agency costs and crew-nationality guidance.

Founding story

Nick Clarke spent four years in the British Royal Marines and in 2011 founded Citadel, a maritime security firm protecting commercial shipping, superyachts and offshore oil and gas projects from piracy in the Indian Ocean and West Africa, which he ran for over ten years and grew into a multi-million dollar business. Concluding that the opaque maritime security industry needed a transparent, auditable and evidence-based digital approach, and being based in Bristol in the UK, he travelled to Singapore to join Entrepreneur First's 7th cohort in January 2019. There he met Hrishi Olickel, who had roughly ten years in technology across electronics, finance, insurtech and academia in South-East Asia, had worked with the Singapore Exchange, Singapore venture capital firms, National Geographic and a large Indian insurance broker, published three papers in computer security and human-computer interaction, co-authored a patent in thermal-technology fire detection, and built data platforms serving over 100,000 users. Olickel has said he knew almost nothing about the maritime industry before the programme, coming from parametric insurance and robotics, and was drawn by the prospect of an essential industry on the verge of digitalisation. They started Greywing in May 2019.

Business model

Greywing sells software to maritime operators, positioned as a SaaS/software development company in the software publishers category. Its platform connects to customers' existing systems and data sources, aggregating them into a single data lake and interface, with product modules addressing crewing, technical, chartering, flights and visa workflows. Sources describe a small team serving shipping companies and vessel operators directly, including collaborative integration projects with large carrier operators such as IINO Kaiun Kaisha.

The sources do not state pricing or contract structure. Greywing is categorised as a software publisher and software development company selling platform modules to shipping operators; one third-party aggregator estimates revenue in the region of $1M, and the same source notes upsell potential from pilot programmes to larger enterprise modules.

Traction

Greywing raised $2.5M in seed funding announced in October 2021 with investors including Flexport, Transmedia Capital, Signal Ventures, Motion Ventures, Rebel Ventures, Y Combinator and Entrepreneur First, and was part of YC's Winter 2021 batch. In October 2021 the CEO said the company was working to have its solution deployed on over 2,000 vessels, equivalent to 3.5% of the world's commercial fleet, which he estimated would remove over 230,000 tonnes of carbon. Greywing's automated flight-sourcing tools are said to have reduced the time to source on-signer and off-signer travel solutions from hours or days to minutes. IINO Kaiun Kaisha adopted its AI crew matrix planning program in 2023. Reported headcount remains small (2-10; approximately 4 as of a July 2026 listing).

Latest developments

The most recent dated developments in the sources are the April 2023 launch of SeaGPT, an AI chatbot for port communication, and the October 2023 adoption by IINO Kaiun Kaisha of an AI-based Crew Matrix Planning program developed in collaboration with Greywing, described as the first automatic AI-powered crew matrix planning tool in maritime. The company's current website is organised around Proteus, a conversational maritime data assistant spanning technical, crewing, flights, visa and chartering use cases, with multilingual and voice access and export to Power BI and Microsoft formats. A third-party data provider dated July 2026 lists the company as having approximately four employees and $2.5M raised.