Maritime AR Intelligence
The people who keep
the world moving
deserve better.
Bulkhead is augmented-reality eyewear for ship crews — guidance, safety, and training, delivered in their field of view while they work.
What Bulkhead does
What Bulkhead does
Crew members wear lightweight AR glasses. Bulkhead sees what they see — and helps.
Paperwork that does itself.
Every safety-critical task — verified, step by step.
Every manual, every drawing — hands-free.
The case
Why this product exists.
A shortage of officers. Crews exhausted to the legal limit. Workload that never lets up between ports. A claim distribution that hides catastrophes — four charts that frame why we built Bulkhead.
01 / 04
The shortage
The shortage
Aggregate seafarer counts get argued about — certificate registries overstate active supply.
The shape of the shortage doesn't. It clusters at the second-in-command ranks — chief officers and second engineers — and concentrates on specialized vessels where certification doesn't transfer.
Drewry projects the gap reaching 10% by 2030. The training pipeline can't close it in time.
Sources — Drewry Manning Annual Review 2025/26 · WMU Journal of Maritime Affairs 2021 · BIMCO/ICS Seafarer Workforce Report 2021 →Hover a cell to see rank × ship-type detail.
02 / 04
The human cost
A day in their life
Each figure represents one in a hundred officers serving today.
Hover a figure to meet them. Toggle the view to see what they carry.
These conditions are routine, not exceptional.
Source — Bhatia et al., WMU Seafarer Welfare Report 2025 →Average work day: 11.5 hours
Legal cap under MLC 2006: 14 hours per day
9 in 100 work past the legal cap
03 / 04
The workload
The workload
Fatigue is not random — it concentrates around the moments precision matters most: port calls, cargo operations, inspection windows. The day stretches because the work-list does, not because the crew chooses to.
On oil tankers, first and second officers breach the 14-hour daily cap in at least 80% of cargo operations. On multi-port voyages, the workload never returns to deep-sea rest between calls — it ratchets through the rotation.
The drivers are structural — manning levels, administrative load, inspection prep.
Sources — Uğurlu, Maritime Policy & Management (2016) · Baumler, Marine Policy (2020) · Rajapakse & Emad, Marine Policy (2023) →04 / 04
The cost
The cost
Between 75 and 96 percent of maritime incidents trace to human error. The financial picture sits one layer down — and is more lopsided than the headline suggests.
The median marine claim settles at €2,712. The average is €88,408 — a 32× gap driven by a small number of catastrophic losses. Three of every four claim dollars trace back to human factors.
The math for prevention is straightforward.
Sources — IMO Maritime Safety Report 2023 · Allianz Global Corporate & Specialty, Safety & Shipping Review →Every one of those numbers describes a vessel
operating right now.
The platform
Each capability, in detail.
Bulkhead runs on lightweight AR glasses. Crew members wear them. The system sees what they see.
The paperwork does itself.
Crew members narrate as they work. Bulkhead captures, categorises, and files the record — defect reports, safety observations, maintenance logs — without them stopping what they are doing. By end of shift, the documentation is complete.
Safety built into the work, not bolted on.
Before any safety-critical task, Bulkhead scans the space, verifies conditions, and walks the crew member through the procedure step by step. It understands the environment. Steps cannot be skipped. The system makes deviation harder than compliance.
Every manual, every drawing — hands-free.
A crew member can ask for a wiring diagram, a torque specification, or a video of how to isolate a particular valve — in their own words, while both hands are on the equipment. The right document appears in front of them.
Who we are
Built from inside the industry.
Bulkhead was built by people who came up through marine engineering, not through a case study. Our background spans commercial maritime operations, academic research in seafarer human factors, and production AI systems. We have read the incident reports, run the models on real operational data, and spent time on the ships where this work happens. We are not observers who found an interesting problem — we are engineers who hit the limits of what current tools could do and decided to build past them.
We stay small deliberately. Every decision is made by people who understand the engine room shift at 0300 and the paperwork waiting after it. That specificity is not a differentiator. It is the product.
Ready to see it
aboard.
We run early access trials with operators who want to put this in front of their crew. Conversations are short and specific — no decks, no demos, just a direct discussion about your context.
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