Hidden vessel data holds real value!

Season 07 of Startup Pass-port by Frontwalker continues with Episode 14 – Efil Bengisu Saygı, CEO and Co-founder of Gelectric. Efil says she was born around vessels - her father has run a traditional maritime maintenance company in Turkey for over 40 years, and she trained as an electrical engineer to work alongside it. She founded Gelectric in 2022 to fix a problem she had watched vessel owners live with for most of her career. Her estimate: a single vessel generates enormous amounts of data, and around 80% of it sits unstructured - text files, PDFs, emails, even photos. Gelectric's AI agents collect that material, analyse it, and turn it into something usable for performance analytics and regulatory compliance. The compliance side is where the stakes are clearest. Crews still file reports manually, which means what Efil calls fat finger errors - a typo, a wrong figure. Submit incorrect data, knowingly or not, and the penalty can run from €100 to a fleet-wide ban from certain ports. Most of these rules come from the IMO, so they apply to vessels everywhere, not just Europe. Efil also talks about finding the maritime industry in Rotterdam far more open to innovation than she expected from a traditionally conservative sector, why partnerships are the unlock for reaching customers at scale, and her plans to expand into Germany and Greece. Three and a half years in, Gelectric runs on around 30 vessels with a team of five. At the NL Startup Competition 2026 finale during Upstream Festival, Gelectric won the Frontwalker Digital Development Prize. This new season brings conversations with founders, innovators, investors, and ecosystem leaders shaping the future of entrepreneurship, recorded in partnership with Erasmus Enterprise and the NL Startup Competition. These conversations are powerful, inspiring, and game-changing, and we can't wait for you to hear them. Stay tuned! New episodes dropping soon!