Starboard
Starboard is a maritime domain awareness platform that can pinpoint any vessel in the maritime environment, assess the vessel's behaviour over time, and notify authorities about any illegal activity at sea.
Fund: Te Pae ki te Rangi
Transaction Summary
Fund: Te Pae ki te Rangi
Date Invested: December 2023 (Seed)
Date Exit: July 2025
Instrument: Equity Investment
IRIS+ Category: Oceans and Coastal Zones | Marine Resources Conservation & Management - SaaS
Why We Invested
Most illegal fishing goes unseen. The ocean is vast, enforcement resources are finite, and the data needed to act has historically arrived too late or not at all. Starboard changes what's visible.
Their platform provides real-time behavioural insights from maritime activity analysis, giving customs agencies, governments, and commercial operators the intelligence to act against illegal fishing, human and drug trafficking, and threats to submarine cables and other subsea assets. Critically, the platform enables collaboration across national boundaries, extending stewardship beyond individual Exclusive Economic Zones. For Aotearoa and our Pacific neighbours, where ocean health is economic and cultural bedrock, that reach matters.
Central to our investment was the addition of explicit impact terms: clearly defined activities and harm-avoidance restrictions built into the structure to protect the integrity of the platform's use and reduce the likelihood of unintended consequences. Monitoring technology is only as good as the governance around it.
Soul Capital exited Starboard in July 2025 following a shift in the company's strategic direction.
Measuring What Matters
Problem:
Visibility over illegal and harmful marine activity is extremely limited, making it difficult for governments and agencies to protect oceans, fisheries, and subsea assets.
What:
Comprehensive, real-time behavioural insights from maritime activity analysis, helping prevent illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing; human and drug trafficking; and crime targeting submarine cables and other assets at sea.
Who:
Customs agencies, commercial asset owners, and organisations responsible for monitoring marine operations, economic exclusion zones, and fisheries: those whose mandate is to protect the ocean and the people who depend on it.
How Much:
Scale: client base across governments, associated agencies, subsea asset owners, and commercial fisheries.
Depth: customers able to take action against offenders whose rights, assets, or operations would otherwise have been compromised.
Duration: length of client engagement; for downstream stakeholders, the mitigation of economic and social harm is broad and enduring.
Contribution:
The maritime behavioural insights Starboard provides would not otherwise have existed. Agencies operating without the platform were working with incomplete pictures.
Impact Risk:
As a tracking and monitoring technology, the platform carries misuse risk, including potential use to intercept seaborne refugees. Investment terms include explicit harm-avoidance restrictions on platform usage and board oversight to mitigate this.
Impact Measures:
Number of customers, segmented by industry and use case. Qualitative insights evidencing how customer use cases contribute to long-term impact outcomes.
