Maritime AR Intelligence
The people who keep
the world moving
deserve better.
01 / 05
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 — WMU Seafarers Workforce Survey 2024 →Average work day: 11.5 hours
Legal cap under MLC 2006: 14 hours per day
9 in 100 work past the legal cap
02 / 05
The shortage
The shortage
The global merchant fleet will be short 89,510 qualified officers by 2026, climbing to 147,500 by 2030.
STCW certification takes three to five years to produce one qualified officer. Demand is outpacing supply by a factor of 2.4.
No training pipeline can close the gap in time.
Source — BIMCO / ICS Seafarer Workforce Report 2021 →03 / 05
The incidents
The incidents
Between 75 and 96 percent of maritime incidents are attributed to human error.
In 2023, the IMO logged 3,107 distinct events — groundings, collisions, fires, flooding. The pattern holds across all ship types and a decade of data.
The root cause is almost never the ocean.
Source — IMO Maritime Safety Report 2023 / Lloyd's Register →04 / 05
The workload
The workload
Work-limit violations cluster around the moments precision matters most: port calls, cargo operations, and inspection windows.
On oil tankers, first and second officers breach the 14-hour daily cap in at least 80% of cargo operations. The drivers are structural — manning levels, administrative load, inspection prep.
Crews are not choosing to work more.
Sources — Uğurlu, Maritime Policy & Management (2016) · Baumler et al., Marine Policy (2021) · Rajapakse & Emad, Marine Policy (2023) →05 / 05
The cost on the books
The cost on the books
Marine insurance claims look manageable until the average is plotted against the median.
The median 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 to human factors.
The math for prevention is straightforward.
Source — Allianz Global Corporate & Specialty, Safety & Shipping Review →Every one of those numbers describes a vessel
operating right now.
The platform
What Keel does.
Keel 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. Keel 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, Keel 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.
Keel was built by a small team with direct experience in commercial maritime operations, human factors research, and industrial AI. We have sailed these routes, read these incident reports, and sat through the post-mortems. We are not observers who found an interesting problem — we are practitioners who reached the limit of what current tools could do.
We are deliberate about staying small. Every decision is made by people who understand what a watchkeeping officer faces at 0300 in the North Atlantic. 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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