The oil and gas industry transports $3T worth of product through oceans and waterways, powering the energy needs of the world’s 8.1 billion person population. The geopolitical importance of the industry has ramifications well beyond energy, impacting jobs, defense, and the manufacturing of practically every good consumed. Vortexa is an intelligence platform that provides comprehensive analytics on oil and gas shipments globally both historically and in real time. The platform integrates real-time data from satellites, 200B+ pings from ships, and shipment data from 100+ shipbrokers, customs agencies, and ports. With trillions of dollars invested in this market, providing data transparency around the market provides invaluable insight for many varied use cases including the physical trading of energy assets, freight competitive intelligence, and financial trading. This level of transparency is unprecedented and has never been aggregated at scale with such deep sophistication. Vortexa has expanded its team to 120+ employees with offices in major oil and gas trading hubs including London, Singapore, Houston, New York, Geneva, and the UAE.
London TechWatch caught up with Vortexa Founder and CEO Fabio Kuhn to learn more about the inspiration for the business, the company’s strategic plans, latest round of funding, which brings the company’s total funding raised to $58M, and much, much more…
Who were your investors and how much did you raise?
$34M Series C investment led by Morgan Stanley Expansion Capital with strong participation from existing investors Notion Capital, Monashees, Metaplanet, FJ Labs, and Communitas Capital
Tell us about your product or service.
- Analytics of energy and freight flows for oil and gas.
- We monitor the flows of over $3T of waterborne movement of energy in real-time.
What inspired the start of Vortexa?
The energy industry has been undergoing a seismic shift driven by information.
Technology breakthroughs such as reusable rocket launching, lower-cost satellites, cloud-scale computational power, and a step-change in machine learning modeling, has provided us with a vast amount of new information about the state and flow of energy on Earth.
I saw a major inflection point in the industry, leading to a new era of opportunities, and founded Vortexa in 2016.
What market you are targeting and how big is it?
Global business with key Markets:
Americas, Europe, MEA, Asia
What’s your business model?
SaaS business model.
How are you preparing for a potential economic slowdown?
Fortunate for us our customers have not been affected. Current market volatilities increase the pressures for the analytics Vortexa has to offer.
What was the funding process like?
Despite one of the toughest fundraising environments for tech companies in the recent past, this funding round was significantly oversubscribed. Vortexa has doubled its valuation since its Series B funding round in 2021 and, having grown three times faster than the median SaaS business over the last year, is near profitability with an immense untapped market opportunity ahead. It is truly a privilege to partner with Morgan Stanley Expansion Capital.
What factors about your business led your investors to write the cheque?
Today, some of the smartest and most successful physical and financial energy traders and analysts use Vortexa’s trusted data and analytics to identify and capture opportunities in the market before anyone else.
The world-class team today remains guided by its founding mission to open, connect and optimise energy flows by combining its pioneering technology and industry expertise, and our story has just begun.
What are the milestones you plan to achieve in the next six months?
Accelerate our go-to market.
Continue to push our innovations and new products.
What is your favourite restaurant in London?
Sushi Samba.
