Kpler Brand Guidelines: A 2014 Commodity-Data Start, MarineTraffic & Spire Maritime

Cargoes first, ships later.

Kpler was founded in 2014 by François Cazor and Jean Maynier, the company’s team page says. Its own account of the start is modest: “two engineers in a kitchen,” in the words of its About page. The first product, according to the timeline on that page, covered liquefied natural gas in 2014, followed by LNG storage in 2015, LPG in 2016 and crude oil in 2017. Dry bulk and refined products came in 2018, oil inventories in 2019, and olefins and freight in 2020.

That order matters for how the company describes itself. When it bought MarineTraffic in 2023, Cazor said that since its creation Kpler had been “focused on tracking cargoes, not vessels.” The business began as a commodity-data firm, giving traders and analysts a view of where physical cargoes were moving, and only later took on ship tracking as a product in its own right.

The corporate base today is in Belgium. A Reuters report carried by MarineLink in February 2023 described Kpler as “Brussels-headquartered,” and the company’s press releases are datelined Brussels. Its local-information page names Kpler Holding SA in Brussels and a French company, Kpler SAS, in Paris. Cazor, who was chief executive through the early acquisitions, is now listed as chairman, and Maynier, chief technology officer in 2021, as president; Mark Cunningham is chief executive.

The company gives two staff figures on its own pages: over 750 employees on the About page, and over 850 from more than 69 nations on the team page. It says it remains primarily owned by its founders and team members.

Five deals in eighteen months, then satellites.

Growth came through acquisitions, which Kpler announces in dated press releases. In September 2021 it bought ClipperData, a New York data firm founded in 2013 with a long record in petroleum liquids coverage. In March 2022 it added JBC Energy, an energy and commodities analysis business, to support Kpler Insight, a research and news portal it had launched in October 2021. In February 2023 it announced what Cazor called a “double acquisition”: MarineTraffic, the Athens ship-tracking service founded in 2007, which had itself just bought FleetMon, a Rostock company also founded in 2007. Reuters reported at the time that Kpler had made five acquisitions in eighteen months.

The next maritime deal took longer. Kpler announced the purchase of Spire Maritime, the satellite vessel-tracking business of Spire Global, on 13 November 2024, saying it would add satellite AIS to its own terrestrial receiver network. The deal closed on 25 April 2025, after a dispute between the two companies over the closing had been settled, The Maritime Executive reported. The UK Competition and Markets Authority then reviewed it; on 25 July 2025 the regulator decided that the completed acquisition did not qualify for investigation under the Enterprise Act 2002 and revoked its initial enforcement order, according to the CMA’s case page.

The product line now runs from data to tools. The company groups its offer as fundamental intelligence, derived insights and decision tools, and names products including the Commodity Terminal, Financial Flows, MarineTraffic and MarineTraffic Inbox. An AI assistant, Kpler Copilot, sits on top. Its timeline adds chemicals in 2021, metals and grains in 2023, containers and chartering in 2025 and pipelines in 2026. Kpler says it processes more than 1.3 billion AIS signals a day; that is the company’s own figure.

Maps, dashboards and data.

Maritime data and software firms sell something that is hard to photograph: information about ships, cargoes and markets. So they show the product itself. Their websites lead with screenshots of vessel maps, market dashboards and chartering tools, set out as the companies publish them, and the interface does much of the work that a product photograph would do for a manufacturer. When Kpler redesigned the MarineTraffic web app in 2023, it described the result as a map-centric layout in a subdued grey, with blue kept as an accent for whatever the user has selected.

Numbers carry the second layer of the message. Data-coverage panels list vessels tracked, voyages recorded, AIS signals processed each day or emails read by the platform, and these figures are given by the companies themselves. Signal Ocean’s platform page has a “Signal in numbers” block of this kind, and Kpler’s About page lists the scale of its data sources in the same way.

Trust is shown through customers. Signal Ocean’s site, for example, places a strip of client logos under the line “Trusted by over 200 customers” and pairs it with short pitches written for each type of user: brokers, charterers, owners and operators. Acquisitions arrive as dated press releases, which is why the history of each firm in this series can be traced through its own newsroom as well as through trade titles such as Lloyd’s List, Hellenic Shipping News and The Maritime Executive.

The third element is publishing. Blogs, weekly market monitors, podcasts and research notes on oil, gas, dry bulk and freight sit beside the product pages, so the firms present themselves as market commentators as much as software vendors. This guide sets out what can be checked about each company, who founded it, who owns it and what it sells, and marks plainly what rests on the company’s own word.

A grey map with one accent colour.

The clearest public account of Kpler’s design thinking concerns MarineTraffic. In a blog post of 1 November 2023, the company described a rebrand and complete redesign of the MarineTraffic web app, which it said served more than five million unique users a month and tracked over 400,000 vessels. The new version is map-centric: the search bar sits at the top centre, the menu and data navigation move to the left, and the map filters to the right, “in line with common conventions in map applications.” The colour scheme changed from a bright blue to a more subdued grey, with blue kept as an accent to show what a user has selected. The post says the work took four months and that the new design aligns with Kpler’s look, “from the logo and font to the presentation of maps and assets.”

Ownership is moving again. In June 2026 Kpler announced a minority growth investment from Sixth Street, the US investment firm. Smart Maritime Network reported on 3 June 2026 that the management team would remain majority owners, that Insight Partners would keep a stake and roll over part of its investment, and that Five Arrows would exit. The deal was announced on 3 June 2026.

The website states its aims plainly. The About page sets out a mission to be “the definitive intelligence platform for global physical trade,” and the company blog runs frequent market notes on LNG, crude, freight, iron ore and grains alongside product and acquisition news.

For a design guide, Kpler shows how a data company can take an acquired ship-tracking app and fold it into one visual system, with a grey map and a single accent colour for what the user has chosen. Compare MarineTraffic, the ship-tracking service it bought in 2023, and Spire Global, which sold it its maritime business. For this guide we use a harbour blue, a chart slate and a selection blue with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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